Seeking balance

My painting titled Seeking Balance will be on exhibit soon at the Mid-Southern Watercolorists 56th Annual Juried Exhibition and I thought I would spend a moment telling the story behind it.  If you have read the painting’s narrative you know I painted this as part of a series of maps with my father in mind.  My father has not passed, but has Alzheimer’s.  It is a strange state of both being here, and not being here. My father was a mathematician, and military man who loved puzzles and spy novels. Thinking it might be a befitting way to communicate, I created this “dead drop”, a classic espionage tradecraft, hoping it might trigger memories by using the professional skills he mastered in his lifetime.  I used symbolic items, some he would have recognized on sight, and some that are strictly personal to me that share my frustrating attempts to integrate into his current reality.  Although he profoundly struggles to navigate his own thoughts, this map invites him to use his strategic mind to locate a destination.  While some objects and their placement are specific ciphers, I included a more organic layer of leaves and seashells which highlight a natural geometry which I love.  The idea to place the skeletal seahorse over symbols of logic (the playing cards) is just a simple tell as to the nature of his disease and "maps" where it is located. But for my father these cards should act as a code that bypasses traditional language and anchor him in a shared memory. He was trained to look for patterns, so the cards are not placed as random items, but as deliberate symbols for him as well.  I used the YD card as a playful nudge to judge if he understood the task (which I originally included in the narrative but had to remove because of length restrictions.) I suppose that makes it more poignant in the painting? The drought-stricken riverbed highlights that the relationship is the only vibrant thing left in an otherwise fading landscape; but is hopefully for him a visual reminder of a beloved place. A glitch in the map, the askew crayon acts as a directional clue; but for me signals the loss of the rigid, mathematical certainty my father once lived by.  All of the crayons and their colors are significant, as are the use and placement of polyhedral dice. The representation of dividers, essential tools for plotting navigation, is itself a literal seeking of balance. A tool we both have used professionally included for both direction and connection. Like most codes the hidden message remains private for now, most importantly functioning as a bridge between my father’s past and current journey.  If anyone out there find themselves in a similar narrative, I suggest that art can be one way to connect.  Back to my brushes.  


"When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions."  - William Shakespeare