Ancestors

This artwork was live-auctioned on Oct 23, 2023 at the Thorne Natural Night Out

About this Work

When I think of my ancestors, images first surface of my grandparents… two I knew, two I didn’t. And then back another generation, and another. A long line of human beings, living lives - as butchers, boxers, bakers - that I can only vaguely imagine in detail and texture.

But if I keep going, before and before… modernity falls away, glasses and timepieces, overalls and frilly slips, eventually stone hammers and bow drills all fall away, even the soft smooth skin of homo sapiens recedes, to reveal thickening hair and calloused feet-bottoms… and I feel, I actually feel, the soft warm fur of my deeper-back ancestors.

And not just from the far-distant past. I feel how they are in me, how they became me, evolved one generation after another, into… me. I want to clarify that I’m not hunting for insight here, and I’m definitely not hammering out a conceptual framework of “who I am”. I explore this, in paint and purpose, most largely to more deeply feel the nature of who I am, of what this is, of who we all are.