1974 Gainesville Florida

Encaustic painting on wood

43 cm x 60 cm

1974, Gainesville Florida

I could have painted a million things for this place. The huge old live oak with Spanish moss that I put on my head like a wig, and then got red bug bites for punishment. The hill where we would slip and slide, skidding on the grass at the bottom and then running back up to do it again. Playing with my friends Pancho and Carlitos, making a swing from a jump rope and falling flat on my back, the wind knocked out of me. The older neighborhood boy throwing my cowboy boots on top of the laundry room. Tasha, my first best friend, whose family came in and out of our lives again and again over the years.

This was Schucht Village, married student housing for medical students at University of Florida. I lived there from approximately 1973 until 1976. My earliest memories are of the apartment and the places around it.

But this memory - the one in this room - is my first memory of music. “Moonshadow” by Cat Stephens. I would ask my mother to play this song over and over on the record player, and I would dance. I think I was three.

1971

Encaustic painting on wood

30 cm x 30 cm

June 1971, Gainesville Florida. A trailer park close to campus on Archer Road, with a view of a lake – Dad bought the trailer and the lot. He planted marigolds along the front of the house because someone gave him free seeds. It was more a pond than a lake, and was behind Mt Vernon apartments. Behind the house was the US agricultural fields. Dad used to climb the fence and pick field corn to eat.

This was the house my parents lived in when I was born. I don’t remember it at all, it only exists in my parents’ memories. I have a couple of photos that show it but I wanted the image to be indicative of someone else’s memory. It’s supposed to be vague. Even the marigolds didn’t seem right to include because I don’t remember them. I’d like to think there were alligators nearby, and that influenced the landscape around the house. It just needed to seem like Florida.

Exploration of Home

This is a project that has been lurking in the back of my mind for a long time. I have lived in approximately 43 homes during my life. I don’t look at this as a bad thing, it’s made me very adaptable. But I do wonder what it is that makes a place home, sometimes… Does the summer I spent in Germany when I was 16 count, for example? All these things, and my memories of the places I’ve lived, I’m going to try to capture in paintings. The paintings that I create may be very different from my other work, and they may be very different from each other. I am finding it hard as I explore this topic, to avoid being too literal with objects and places in my memories. I don’t necessarily want each piece to be a picture of a house, either. Sometimes it’s the landscape that influenced my feelings about a place, more than a structure. I am not going to let any preconcieved notions restrict the direction of the work, either. This is an exploration of what home means, to me. I have never had a home for very long, but I have never been homeless. We shall see where this exploration leads.