24x30 - Acrylic/ Resin/ Glitter/ Gold Leaf.
When I was still so little my feet didn’t touch the ground in the chair at the dinner table, we would go to Auntie Angels for Thanksgiving. The couches were white, with claws for legs and covered in plastic. There was a plastic runner on the carpet, making a path to walk. White marble end tables and on top - my favorite thing and the reason this painting sparkles so much - Aunties table chandelier, made of hundreds of hanging crystal beads. With the clarity of it being yesterday except 32 years ago nothing brought me joy like running my fingers through those hanging crystal beads.I can still see it, feel it and hear it at the same time.
Downstairs the whole room was autumn-colored. That was where Auntie had the long table set. She made these apple slices that were always a family mystery but everyone looked forward to every year, and the whole giant salad was from her garden. Food that can always be recreated but in the wavelengths of time and memory is never the same. The house was always really warm and I can still feel it - the cool blast of air when the door would open and more people would bustle in. Full of coats and plates.
It’s funny all this time later in Southern California. It’s late September and it feels like I haven’t felt a blast of cold like that in 32 years, but I can still feel it. After dinner everyone would drink coffee out of these porcelain coffee cups with a traced leaf outline on the brim. In my mind, those desserts stretch. They seemed to last forever.
In a meeting once it was Thanksgiving night and a man shared “There isn’t anything I wouldn’t give to be at that table of people for five more minutes.” Something I didn’t understand at the time. But those memories become the nonlinear gold threads that keep me connected to a sense of self that belongs to something.
I wasn’t born yet in the 70s but every photo I have ever seen appears to look and feel softer, like velvet. A little blurry but the tones are always warm and everyone looks happy. I wanted to create something that reflected those moments of safety with my family, but that kind of safe that I felt not yet knowing that an opposite existed. In this work I see and feel the movement of all of those memories - the gold threads that still hold it all together. Soft like velvet. Rich like Thanksgiving.
