36″ x 48″
Sublimating the actual into the apocryphal – a phrase borrowed from Faulkner. Apocryphal, spurious, of questionable authority.
While this might have been painted from a photograph of my grandmother as a girl, it only remains so if I say it with words, in a title, or accompanying text. Without words, the image opens back up into the silent nature of painting. One of the greatest tensions between text and image, I think, is that text has the ability to make a claim – be truthful and authoritative or spurious and deceitful – while images do not, not on their own. They just sit there being colors and lines arranged in a certain way, more or less full or empty of meaning, based on the taste and temperament of the viewer. For all the similarities between writers and painters, this seems a fundamental difference.
Anyway, it was actually my mother.