Generations

In the spring of 2023, in the home stretch of my pregnancy with Walt (scroll to the bottom to see a photo of his chunky 4 month old self!), this piece “Generations” came together…a labor of love and curiosity and imagination. Materials I had never worked with before… tea, teabags, crumpled watercolor paper. The Indiana grey sky had just begun to crack open again to reveal bright blue, and I worked outside as much as possible.

I used watercolor paper and crinkled it up to imprint creases and marks on the surface. The process reminded me of how time tells a story on our skin. I kept picturing a grandparent holding a baby and how different their skin looks… one wearing years of experiences and the other completely untouched by life.

Then I poured tea over the paper. As it dried, it pooled in the valleys of the paper, dying those sections extra dark.

After supergluing the pieces together I soaked the piece again and scraped the seams with a knife, melding them together and creating a more cohesive surface.

The existentialism was real in this one… homeboy was kicking through the whole process.

The idea here is that the figures represent our generation stretching in an endless line behind each of us. If you stop and think about all the people who came before you, what do you feel? Maybe for some of us it fills us with appreciation and awe. For others, maybe sadness and confusion as we reflect on trauma in our bloodline. For most of us, it’s certainly a mix.

At this point I decided to add a hawk and a nest in a tree as another detail pointing to the generational theme. Watercolor is not forgiving… once it’s on the paper it’s staying. So just to be sure I knew what I was doing, I practiced painting this hawk on a separate sheet of paper as a study. It’s currently in my shop here:

The scene with the tree top hawk is on the bottom left of the finished painting, and I also added a flying hawk in the top right… I imagined it was flying home to it’s mate.

We ride on the shoulders of countless people who were good and evil in their lifespan, young once and then old, foolish and then wiser, who might have taught their children something helpful, which might have been passed down to their grandchildren, who might have taught us. Our ancestry holds pain, joy, connection, belonging, loneliness, courage, regret... Perhaps the most mystical thought of all is that we had no say in the matter… we just appeared in the line, living this great mystery of life in the present time, an extension of all the people before us and a connection to all the ancestors who will be after us.

Walt, 4 months