Letters to Home

It's official, I've sent in my submission for Letters to Home!  If you're in New York, you can see this collection of letters from artists around the world on exhibit April 5 at the Brooklyn Art Library.  If you're not in NY, a boxed anthology will join the 2012 Sketchbook Project Tour.

Brooklyn Art Library

103A N. 3rd St

Brooklyn, NY 11249

This letter to a wooded lot from my childhood (now an apartment complex) recalls a fort my brother's friends made to keep me entertained while they did grown-up things.  It's one of my first memories of the outdoors.  This act of recalling and recording the experience reaffirmed just how powerful an influence nature is in my work.

Anxious to start their own adventures, my brother's friends invent a world just for me.  And with my hose of twigs and leaves complete, they leave me with this directive: see how quiet you can be - how long can you go without making a sound?  Peacefulness washes over me.  I know that I will excel at this.  My soft smile lets them know I understand.  My vow of silence has already begun.  
I lay supine.  Though the roof thatched with fern fronds, through the sea of tiny green fingers shielding me from it all, I watch shadows of the real world passing by.  I want this to last forever, to simply be held by the loamy ground.  My senses are heightened in this hideaway.  
The fragrance of the forest nourishes each breath.  
Light dances for me, slipping stealthily through the woven roof.  
Surrounded by green and brown, I am quiet.  
So quiet.
Done with their outing, my brother and his friends return for me, calling my name.  I can't bear to break my silence.  this is where I want to be.  

I seem to think that I refused to make a sound, even when they were looking for me and calling my name.  Which may have gotten me into trouble.  Since I was right where they had left me, and I was instructed not to make a sound, it made no sense to the four year old me.    

Letters To Home

I'm currently working on a piece in response to Art House Co-op's Letters To Home project.  They've asked artists to write a letter to their childhood home.  It's a hard task to think back to the home that witnessed your evolution to adulthood.  You're confronted with all the secrets those walls hold - that secret crush, the mean things you said when no one was listening, a stolen dram followed by obsessive teeth brushing to avoid getting caught.  It's amazing to think we survive the journey and that our loved ones, well, still love us. 

Most of my memories return to the outdoors - the pussy willow tree that was cut down when I was 4 (I was devastated and briefly became the Lorax), the cherry tree I would climb time and time again in search of the next gift it would create for me, the apple trees that I watched grow to bear fruit.  You sense a pattern?  Yes, most of all, my home was not my house at all.  It was in the trees, and the woods surrounding the housing development I grew up in.

Stay tuned for the story of how my love affair with trees started.  It's due on the 15th!