“ Things Happen For Good Or Bad “

When I painted this, I was not trying to make a picture of a thing. I was trying to put a feeling of memory that will not stay whole. The pale field is the space that is left after something has been taken or forgotten. The dark, torn shapes are what remains: pieces of body, pieces of land, pieces of a face that used to be a mask. The yellow is the part that still burns. It is the part that refuses to go quiet. I work the way memory actually works for me. It does not arrive as a clean story. It arrives as fragments that have been cut, stained, and pushed against each other until they almost form a figure, then fall apart again. The number 8 is not decoration. It is a marker. This is one more attempt to hold the same thing I keep losing. I want the viewer to feel the pull between what is still standing and what has already been torn away. That tension is the work. That is what I was after.