Milepost 2: Goodbye To Sandra Dee

“Azaleas, III”

charcoal & acrylic on canvas

30” x 30”

2018

Subsisting on savings with no time to lose, I began construction on a few dozen stretchers of various sizes. One by one, they were stretched with canvas and piled into the studio awaiting transformation. 

Despite my excitement about the challenge ahead, there was one potentially significant hurdle, I had not actually painted in years (nearly eight), nor had I even attempted to create art professionally as a non-student, like, ever. Sure, I’d sold work in the past, had pieces in a few shows, done a little something for a friend or two, but I had not engaged in a regular, focused studio-practice since graduate school. 

The last time I’d actually created “art” was seven years prior as a graduate student at the University of Alabama for my thesis exhibition, marking the finish line of my graduate studies. Completely unlike any of the work I had created during my tenure there, my exhibition, “The Desperate Measures of a Mama’s Boy in Troubled Times,” was the culmination of a months-long grieving process. 

Just before my final year in the graduate program, my mother became desperately ill. A terminal blood-disease began gradually starving her blood of oxygen, rendering her weaker and weaker by the day. She and my father finally shared the news about her illness with my brother and me once her condition had been diagnosed, and just six months and one day later she succumbed to the disease.

Although those six months before her passing were unbelievably difficult, it was the months afterwards that proved nearly unbearable. Though I had classes to teach and credits to earn, I was overwhelmed with grief, and in an act of self-preservation, I sequestered myself away from campus returning only to teach or to attend class. 

In my seclusion I found myself surrounded by treasures that had recently ended up in my care, those of other dear family members. My paternal grandmother, Ruby, her son, my Uncle Harry, and my mother’s cousin, Uncle Kenny, had all just passed in the two years prior. In an attempt to organize their items (Ruby’s vintage kitchen tools, Uncle Kenny’s barware collectibles, and Mama’s books and family photographs — and to find a place for them in my 500 square foot apartment) I began grouping like items in piles.

In that disorganization I saw that these objects, formerly treasured possessions, were speaking to me and to one another, and I began to feel that an arrangement of these objects would be more capable of communicating my message than painting could at that time. Despite being unsure of how my thesis committee or the Art Department would react to the abrupt change in my work, I barreled ahead, writing my thesis and planning for the exhibition with these objects as my medium. 

Despite years of studying, training, and refining my own personal identity as a painter, my thesis exhibition developed into a full-gallery installation, featuring a half dozen vignettes/arrangements dedicated to my mother. It was her life story and her life’s work told through her own life’s treasures and those of her family, presented by her youngest son.

As if on autopilot, the show came together, truly encapsulating not just everything I needed to convey at that time but also many of the themes and ideas I had been working with for years. Somehow, I managed to pull off the exhibit with the full support of my thesis committee as well as the Art Department and was awarded my Master’s degree. In retrospect it remains, personally, one of my proudest achievements, not just in art but in life as well.

So where to start after such a long, long hiatus?

My first inclination in the studio was to begin where I’d left off years earlier in painting. Before Mama began the fight for her life, I was working with our family photographs, portraits and candids. For years, I’d painted in black and white only, searching for a way to combine my interest in my familial history and our family photographs with my personal identity as an artist against the cultural backdrop of the American Deep South. 

With that as my template (and after many failed first-attempts) in the quiet of Mama’s house, I finally achieved my first true success in painting in nearly a decade. “Mama, Natchez, MS, 1961, I” is a painting of a photograph of my mother as a young woman dressed in formal garb. The piece managed to bridge the gap of where I had left off and where I believed I should begin. Much to my surprise, there was still a painter somewhere within me, and in celebration I hung the painting in Mama’s dining room in her home in Natchez, Mississippi. 

Despite my initial satisfaction with myself and her portrait, I felt that something was still missing in my work, something integral. My practice of painting exclusively in black and white began to feel, in a sense, formulaic. Though I was attached to this process and knew I could continue in this vein forever, it didn’t feel sustainable creatively. I was denying aspects of my creativity by placing so much emphasis on developing a cohesive body of work, not providing room for experimentation or discovery. Instead, I needed to allow the work to determine its own direction and not force it to be something else. 

Allowing this change to occur freed my creativity, and color emerged — color, Color, and more COLOR! Immediately, I found relief from the rigid guidelines I had originally developed for myself in this challenge. Granting my creativity the freedom to determine its own path opened the floodgates. With bright pinks and greens, “Azaleas, #2” practically painted itself and became one of the first pieces sold out of the bunch. It represents the moment that I (re)discovered my voice as an artist.

This year I celebrate that leap of faith and its resulting discovery with “Azaleas, #3."