Day Zero

Despite its impromptu nature the trip to Brazil was actually pretty dense, emotionally speaking. In addition to the arrival of my first nephew, Thomás, it was a statement of demarcation between the way I regarded the house in which I grew up and my parents' new high rise condo. This place never has been nor will ever be my home with its bizarre segregation of "company" space and living space; with the dog held prisoner in the dark, thick carpeted corridor and family spaces full of ad hoc chinese moldings, pulled out wall sockets and hodgepodge crappy furniture; and the cat exiled to the bright but utterly still company room where all of the nice furniture and rugs congregate in a poorly curated exhibit about my family's domestic life. No, this place might contain the artifacts of my childhood but it serves none of the same functions as the old place.

Then as the week wore on, and particularly after I agreed to make a painting for my mom and started using one of the side rooms as a studio, I came to really like it there. In particular the studio with its bare hardwood flooring (unlike the main receiving room, crammed full of persian rugs), I found reminiscent of the old house while at the same time free from all its baggage.

There was nowhere in the old house where I could have had the space, mental or physical, let alone the light and ventilation to make a painting. In fact, there had never been any space in the old house within which to create much of any sort, and this awareness made me both pained at all the years of repression and relieved at their end. The few sad paintings I did make in all the years I had lived and visited there had been such clandestine projects, undertaken in the ill-lit, poorly-ventillated cramped quarters of my bedroom, or angled precariously between the wall panels to opportunistically capture a slice of natural light during peak daylight hours, all the while offending the stern modern lines of the house. They too were all gone now, the tawdry things.

This clear and blank space was undoubtedly a factor in my being able to finish a painting in three days, lightning fast even for me. It was a liberating experience which helped unlock the other liberating dimensions of the trip. It was so liberating that I didn't even take offense when my mom asked me "how many more coats" it would take before I was done. Since I don't live there and she doesn't define my life, I can laugh at the English slippage like any stranger would have.

Here's what a 10-hour painting looks like: