I painted this as a remembrance for my mum. I was so incredibly sad for a long, long time. But painting helped in my grieving process. When I painted this piece, I filled it with all the good memories I had of her, and I made this painting on her first birthday after her death, so it is a very emotional piece for me.
I am very inspired by Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime. My mum was Australian, and I grew up reading the fascinating mythological stories about the ancient times in Australia, and my family had a few aboriginal artifacts. The art of creating the complex lines and patterns is sacred, spiritual and very meditative, and takes years of training and practice to master. In true Aboriginal culture, each line and every dot has significance and consists of an intricate storytelling method that I cannot even begin to come close to doing justice to the real thing.
While my family and I were on a journey to bring my mum's ashes back to her home in rural Western Australia in 2007, my sister and I took a walk together one day. We happened to walk into an art gallery that was run by a family of Aboriginal women. We started talking with the woman who was painting and watching the gallery and when we told her what we were doing, she said: "Your mother will never leave you if you spread her ashes to the wind and allow her to come back to you. She will follow you even back to America, and she will be with you always."
6" x 8"
acrylic on canvas
June 2007
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