On Grieving a Worldview
New painting in progress
I’ve been listening to interviews of Agustina Bazterrica while starting a new body of work, Our Sometimes Home.
I read Tender is the Flesh last summer and I couldn’t put it down. Each sentence was devastating. Whenever there was a glimmer of hope, it was met with gut wrenching reality.
On the way to Denver this fall, I listened to The Unworthy. Bazterrica has a subtle way of confronting the reader with their own beliefs, calling upon the reader’s belief systems as integral to the story. Strategically, she does not define the truth in her worlds, because truth depends on the reader.
I’ve scrapped false starts on this exhibition several times. But it wasn’t until this past week that I found the right starting place.
In my paintings, I am learning to let past narratives drift out of focus. Metaphors and motifs become background layers and context to make room for new thoughts. And I’m ready to pivot my focus again although it feels like I just did that.
Because, last year, much like the prompts in Bazterrica books, I was confronted by my own belief system. I found myself waking up morning after morning with intense anxiety about the world because my worldview was shifting. Truth felt like something that was vibrating and morphing. So my paintings turned into these little portals of escapism. I focused on fantasy as a padded room to explore race and perception through metaphor and aesthetic that felt nostalgic.
But as I planned to pick up where I left off with I Live With a Ghost and the haunted house archetype, I started to feel like my padded room was further down the hall from where my thoughts, confusions, and anxieties live. And if I let too many rooms appear between, Truth would have more options to choose from.
So I’m picking up another Bazterrica book, Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird, while I restart on this new body of work. You can only live in a padded room for so long before the room has lost its meaning.
In this new work I’m exploring what it feels like to sit with grief, anxiety, and overwhelm. I just want to notice. How does it feel to grieve a worldview, to only know culture through grief, and to be overwhelmed by the grief of others?
Image from Simon & Schuster
Currently reading in studio
