we are all home
We are all home is one of my favorite paintings I’ve worked on to date. It reminds me of dewy summer mornings, hearing my kids running around outside, and just this sense of freedom within painting.
There are some sneaky symbols in the painting - the Protea flower (one of my favorites) reminds me of South Africa, where Eric and I took our honeymoon over a decade ago. I often add that into my work as a nod to him and that wonderful adventure we had together.
At the top of the painting is an apricot tree - accompanied by a bowl of apricots on the left side, they remind me of my time in France - a formative year (nearly 20 years ago) that has continued to inspire me. My host mom would always have a bowl of fresh apricots on the breakfast table. Throughout the painting the apricots turn into clementines - paired with juice glasses (fancier than we use in our house) they are a little nod to my kids who could eat clementines all day (me too).
As a print and pattern designer, I love to include my fabric in the paintings - I think pattern just adds so much to our lives and my favorite thing is to mix patterns and images in order to create something that’s just on the very edge of being overwhelming (but not in an anxiety-inducing way, I go to yoga too much to do that).
This painting has some fabric added on in little bits (the colorful patches in the night sky and around the plate on the lower right), but I used my own fabric as reference to replicate in the painting. A few of these patterns started out digitally, but for the most part, my pattern-work begins as a painting itself & I love that circular process of painting -> fabric -> painting.
Finally, almost everything in this painting comes from somewhere else - the Greek-inspired vase, the apricot, the clementine, the fig, the protea, the white and blue Chinese pottery, and so on, and I just want to acknowledge with this painting that our strength as humans is that we have a shared life experience and a shared humanity - all of the varied complexity that makes each of us up is part of the beautiful framework that holds our global society together, because, we are all home here 。⋆☾★