Warmth

From the studio

Every November 1st, our holiday tree goes up, and it stays until Valentine’s Day. We’re not religious, and Santa isn’t part of our family traditions. I simply love having a tree in the house. More specifically, I love walking into our living room around four in the morning, before the day has begun, and finding it glowing in the darkness. It reminds me of spending the holidays with my grandmother. The smell of cinnamon, the lights, and that wonderful feeling of warmth that seems to exist somewhere between memory and home. It’s a feeling I’ve carried with me for decades, and every year I get to invite it back into our living room for a few months. When I began thinking about a painting for an upcoming Ornamental Show at Mycelium Gallery, I knew I wanted to capture that feeling. But as the tree emerged on the canvas, so did the inhabitants of my little artistic universe. The Committee, my chorus of internal selves, became the ornaments. A familiar serpent wound its way through the branches as garland. One of my birds took its place at the top, where a star would ordinarily sit. The tree became a gathering place for the strange collection of characters, symbols, and energies that have populated my paintings for the last couple of years. And somewhere in the process, I realized I wasn’t simply painting a holiday tree. I was painting the entirety of myself. The many selves, the contradictions, the memories, the energy, the chaos, and the connections holding it all together. My entire internal universe, gathered beneath the comforting glow of something I’ve loved since childhood. I call it Warmth. Because beneath all the symbolism, philosophy, and peculiar inhabitants, that’s what the painting is really about. The comfort of belonging. The beauty of being home. And the possibility that even the strangest parts of ourselves might find a place among the lights. Even the snakes.