Anything Simple in There

This is a vibrant, beautiful, chaotic painting built up in layers of paint, marker, and collaged paper on a wooden panel.

Much of the collage material for this piece was sourced from a Richard Scarry book of classic fairy tails. I'm using the imagery and text from the book as a jumping off point for thinking about my own personal memory of childhood, the experience of nostalgia, and my experience now as a father of two small children. The boys are three and a half and six months as I write this, ages where the stories we tell and the media we expose them to is so formative.

I'm using a lot of white space from the book, areas of the pages that don't have anything on them, or parts of the page where the image has been cut out. It's like collaging negative space into the piece. The blank white paper covers layers of paint underneath. I'm doing this mostly on the edges of the piece, pushing the content towards the center, creating a permeable membrane around the nucleus of the composition, which is filled with abstract patterns, doodles, smears of color, and various treatments of text. It's a mind-scape of wandering though. The themes circle ideas of growth, parenting, repetition, toil, delight, and sadness. To remember childhood is to remember that childhood ends.

My three and a half year old found a picture of this painting in my notes app on an iPad he was supposed to be making his own drawings on. He asked if it was my painting, and when I replied in the affirmative he said, "it's sooo beautiful."