Devotions

A Picture of Robin with his Sand Lizard. 5x7 in. Oil on Aluminum Flashing. 2023

This thesis show, like the hopes I had for my life, was meant to be different. I had grander plans, nothing concrete, but still - I imagined creating more important looking larger scale works, and a catalog to accompany them - all the markings to prove that this work should be paid attention too. My first solo show, and at a university gallery no less, was meant to be something else. However, fate had other plans.

In the early winter of 2022, during the height of the pandemic surge, my partner of 12 years was diagnosed with late stage colon cancer. By the time it was discovered, he was two weeks away from liver failure caused by numerous metastatic lesions that spread from the primary tumor in his sigmoid colon. My partner, Robin, who studied probability and statistics among other things, told me that he had a 50% chance of living a year past his diagnosis, and a 7% chance of living 5 years beyond his diagnosis. Robin died this August, 18 months after the cancer was discovered.

When your life has blown up and all the pieces of your hope scatter, things like having an important looking thesis show don’t matter much anymore, and finishing a program that feels intertwined with so much sadness and hardship becomes imperative. Life could actually be short, for you, or for me, as it was for Robin. And so, with that urgency in mind, I present to you my thesis show made up of small grief stricken paintings that I made after his death. The paintings are snapshots and meditations on the artifacts of a life that coexisted with mine, and things collected leading up to or shortly after his death.

When Robin was first diagnosed all the existential questions that I felt before, became the ever present self interrogation of why do I do this thing called painting. I actually don’t have an answer as to why I paint, other than I like doing it and that I’m probably too deep into a sunk cost fallacy. Over the past year, struggling with the confines of limited time and attention span, I began to make small paintings on gessoed 5x7 aluminum flashing. The framework was simple: find an object or two from my surroundings, spend a few uninterrupted hours paying respect to its existence, and perform a devotional act towards the practice of painting.

So I followed this scaffolding for this thesis show. Selecting from Robin’s few material possessions things caught my eye, or held some significance, arranging them on a table, mixing the colors, composing a composition, and trying to make ephemeral things more permanent. These artifacts include a toy lizard made out of sand that Robin always had draped over his desktop computer, a jade wolf given to him by his deceased mother, his falling apart driving gloves, pictures of him from when our life was more simple and he was healthy, his old work id, a miniature copy of his diploma that he framed as a joke, broken butterfly wings I found on walks while he was in hospice, and the cobalt blue t-shirt that he married me in.

These paintings are moments in time remembering moments with Robin. Though I cannot understand why Robin died so young, or what is the point of painting in this grief stricken world, I return to it because it provides comfort and an outlet during difficult experiences. I’ve been devoted to painting for 15 years, and to Robin for 12. These are my devotions to the greatest loves of my life.

no visual agenda