Querencia
“ Querencia Series : The Shore Keeps it’s Promses”
Acrylic on Canvas 24× 38
My work is a reflection of something I have been looking for all of my life. Home. The Spanish word "Querencia" describes it most fully. It means a place where one feels safe, a place from which one's strength of character is drawn, a place where one feels at home. Home. What an emotionally loaded word.
Is home the place we were born? Is it the place our parents reside, or the place where we reside? Or is it, quite possibly, a space known only within us? The people, places and things that reveal themselves in our dreams and memories are sometimes nonspecific, yet somehow recognizable: someone or something known, or almost remembered. That name, that word you struggle for on the tip of your tongue. Memories and impressions of current places and places from the past, reminiscent of the shore, the city street, the wooded hillside, the neighborhood, the highway, and old friends.
And possibly your genetic memory. My family hails from the Netherlands. My father was the first one in this line of the family born here in the States. The first time I flew to the Netherlands to see family, I remember distinctly thinking, no wonder Michigan is full of the Dutch. This is such a familiar landscape. Was that real, or was it something I felt in my body? Was it home, or was it the genetic memory of home?
Painting, for me, is exploring tone, pattern, light, space and color until those memories and impressions trigger form. A pictorial representation that is deeply intimate and suggestive, where the tug of sensations that comfort, or pinch, stirs up emotion and memory. In today's society, people move around. They move for work, challenge, diversity, opportunity and a myriad of other reasons. Losing a sense of home is common. My paintings are about change and transition, and therefore the conflicts that arise between the excitement, desire and lure for the new, novel and untraveled, and the yearning and thirst for the comfort of the known, familiar and habitual.
When we're home, we wish we were somewhere else, and when we're somewhere else, we wish we were home. So the only place we are entirely happy is when we are between where we've been, where we are, and possibly where we're going. A romantic, imagined place within us, not a real physical location. I am not making a social statement about our mobile society. I am making a human statement about our collective loss and search for that same sense of safety and familiarity, all the while running from it.
For me, painting is a physical act that connects the outer world to the unconscious in an immediate way. It is an opportunity to check in with myself and see where I am. By settling body and mind, and with clear intention, I pick up the brush. I connect to sensation and feeling by painting from the inside out, through movement, energy and intuition. There is no guide but the moment in time, my moment in time, and a pleasure that whispers, this here, that there, try this, do that.
What surfaces is often not what was happening in my mind, but memories in my body. Like the story my grandfather told me about my dad. After high school, my father hitchhiked all the way out to Seattle, something I would bet doesn't happen anymore. He found himself in a rooming house, where a woman gave him a job washing dishes while he went to business school. When he finished, he simply repeated the sequence and hitchhiked back to Michigan. When he arrived, he found his shoes by the back entry steps, exactly where he had left them the day he started his journey. I heard, through the family grapevine, that my grandmother had wanted to move them. My grandfather would not allow it. They had to stay right where they were until my dad came home.
Once home, my father never left for parts unknown again. He built a business and raised a family. He traveled, of course, but always returned to that little town along the shore of Lake Michigan. His four daughters, however, did not. Today we live all over the country: Michigan, Missouri, Alabama and California. Sometimes I long for home. Sometimes I am glad I left. But these days I find myself thinking that maybe we lost something important, a sense of ourselves that comes from staying rooted in one place, something generations before us had no choice but to accept.
I guess I am merely asking a question. I don't assume to know the answers, and most likely it is different for each of us. The manner in which my paintings are created allows me to bring that emotional, intuitive and spiritual home into something real and physical, set in time and space. They are mind and body photographs that reflect everyday life and the way it impacts me: sunlight and shadows: stillness and movement: sound and quiet.
I still love the movement of light on the water, storms coming over the lake, that particular quality of midsummer light when it stays bright until after 10 pm, and the memory of falling asleep to the sound of my parents talking in the living room, once all of us kids were down and safe. "Good kids, when you are sound asleep," my dad used to say.
My dad had a song for each of his four daughters. Mine was "When It's Springtime in the Rockies, I'll Be Coming Home to You." After he died, I flew back to California carrying a grief I had not expected, deeper than I knew how to hold. Driving on the 405 one afternoon, that exact song came over the radio, a song no one plays on a Los Angeles freeway in the middle of the 2010s. I cried the whole way home. It felt like a gift. Even writing this, I can feel it, the tears, and something like his hand resting on my head.
He was home. Mom was home. My sisters were home. I left too, not because I stopped loving them, but because I needed room to become someone new.
Home. I have come to believe that home is inside of us. We carry it wherever we go. It is not about a place. It is the touch of a hand, a certain look, a sound, a smell, the timbre of a voice, the tug of nostalgia, the small things the mind forgets first and the body remembers last.