In Winchester, people wait for the elderly to die off so that membership at the boat club opens up. As the revolution of 1968 rocks the west, my four year old mother toddles to school in a homemade coat adorned with a Mao Zedong pin. Andrew Loomis’s canonical tome “Drawing the Head” doesn’t equip me to draw my own face, but I don’t notice or mind. In Winchester, I don’t look like anyone except for three classmates with surnames piled up at the end of the alphabet. It’s Yang and Zhang and Zhu and none of us hang out because we’re each too busy working on fitting in with the rest.
I learn to paint and my vocabulary becomes spotted with French and Italian. Trompe l’oeil, alla prima, and disegno don’t feel like they were destined to end up in my hands. And yet they have. So I create paintings, objects, and texts to articulate an uncanny position of being at the intersection of historical, temporal, and cultural complexity.
Whatever my approach, I find recourse in the act of making as both provocation and solution to the problem of being in our time and place.