LITTLE GIRLS IN THE GARDEN IN FRANCE
These paintings tell a visual story of childhood
Les Petites Marguerites
The idea for the painting came from an old family snapshot. The image depicts a romantic childhood scene; baby cousins are playing with water in a garden. The image is a representation of my unfulfillable wish - to return to childhood and find a garden of eden.
Painting the image helped me reflect on the hidden personal meanings of the events that unfolded after that point in time. Multiple causes separated the people in the photo; death, illness, misunderstandings, space and time.
I realized I painted myself three times. Once as the baby I was, once as the baby who was lost, and once as the mother-figure I became.
Watering the flower children, pencil sketch
My usual process involves sketching with pencils, oil pastels, and sometimes ink or watercolors. Often the first sketch captures something that the later painting might not.
I wanted to paint my grandmother, because she was the one who took the snapshot that I based the previous painting upon. What surprised me, was how surprised she was in the second snapshot. I envisioned my grandfather, popping out of the doorway to catch her unawares with his new camera, in their new life in America.
My grandfather was like the fisherman in the old stories, who caught a mermaid by hiding away her skin. No longer free to transform herself and slip away, he brought her to a new land far from her waters.
Les Soeurs
The distances in our family relationships did not begin with the garden in France. I looked for a time in my mother’s childhood that might hold a vision of home, instead, I found her and her sister’s story of immigration. I painted them in their hand knit pullovers, that their French aunties would have made, to symbolize how the things they brought from home brought the comfort, connection, and continuity of their relationships along to their new world.