Painting Memories: Honoring Our First House

I admittedly haven’t been doing a lot of art-making lately. Getting settled into a new routine in Norfolk (along with the malaise I experience during heat waves) has kept me from an easel or sketchbook recently. A couple of weeks ago, however, I did complete an important personal project: a commemoration of the memories we made at our last house. Let’s take a look!

The Need to Acknowledge Memories

The catalyst for this painting was the move to Norfolk. Brandon and I experienced this transition rather differently. My engagement with Williamsburg and our house at Sasha Court ended fairly swiftly. As soon as I defended the dissertation, I switched to working at the museum full-time. During the actual move, I spent most of my time in Norfolk. Once we got our furniture out of Williamsburg, I didn’t see the old house at Sasha Court again. It was onto the next thing, with no time to process the changes taking place.

Brandon, on the other hand, had plenty of time to think about the old house. It was he who cleared out the last of the random stuff that invariably appears during any move. He was also the one who stayed onsite during the final, professional cleaning. All this means that he spent a lot of time in the empty house. As a result, he experienced melancholy as he moved through its bare rooms and recalled the memories we’d made there.

Both of us, then, wanted to honor and recognize this house. I needed to process the move. Brandon needed a way to release all the memories he’d relived. Painting accomplished both objectives.

Distilling Memories

Rather than paint every memory of the house, I opted to distill our experiences into a singular, abstract composition. From the onset, I decided to represent the house itself through what I considered its three most distinguishing features. These included the vaulted ceiling in the living room, the large windows, and the patio.

Once I settled on these architectural features, I painted different sketches to get a sense of the overall look and palette. Initially, I just focused on the house itself. I created a pyramidal shape in the center to represent the exterior silhouette. Then I filled it with green brushwork to suggest our backyard views. I painted the surrounding space in blue to signify the sky. Finally, I suggested the patio through red lines.

From there, I started thinking about the memories I wanted to evoke. I eventually created three potential versions of the final painting. In the first, I painted the cats looking outward, as they often did when watching the birds. In the other two versions, I included Brandon and myself in our wedding clothes along with the cats. Our most powerful memory, after all, getting married, took place on the patio. Once I had these sketches, I showed them to Brandon and asked which one he liked best. When he picked out the second one, I knew which one I’d be doing.

Refining the Composition

Once I had the basic composition, it was time to refine it. I spent most of this time figuring out how I wanted to render our faces. Since I was painting this piece as an abstraction, I wanted to keep it simple. I needed enough details though, to indicate that the figures represented Brandon and myself. I also knew I’d need to work within my own limitations, as my portraiture skills are at their best when rendering animals, not people.

Several modern portraits influenced me while working out these renderings, including Malevich’s faceless peasants, and Modigliani’s mask-like visages. Frida Kahlo’s painting of herself and Diego Rivera at their wedding was another inspiration because she evoked folk portraiture through her use of exaggerated scale and rigid postures. I also recalled American vernacular portraits I’ve seen over the years, particularly at Colonial Williamsburg. I drew versions of us with no facial features, or select ones such as eyes or noses. Eventually, I settled on showing all our facial features, but with no modeling to keep everything flat and abstracted.

Painting Process

I completed the painting over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, when I could paint for several hours each day uninterrupted. As I worked, I made subtle changes to enhance the composition. I extended the length of my wedding dress, for instance, so that our two kitties would stand out more clearly against the resulting off-white background. I changed the color of Brandon’s suspenders from the tan ones he used at our wedding to his favorite red ones I got him later that year for Christmas. To signify the passage of time, I split the background in half. The right side remained green to suggest spring and summer, while the left side took on more yellow and red hues to evoke the fall. All these decisions were intended to honor our overall time at the house rather than commemorate a single event or memory.

Reflections

This painting is undeniably one of the more personal pieces I’ve completed. While Brandon and I are happy to be starting a new chapter in Norfolk, we both wanted to pay respect to the first place we lived in as homeowners. A lot of important events happened there, from getting married to writing and defending my dissertation. It’s also the first space where we really started defining our own tastes as homeowners, which we expressed by repainting walls, replacing flooring, and making other changes to the space. It was the first place we lived in that felt like our own rather than a temporary rental requiring minimal alterations, and we both enjoyed living there.

Not that either of us is stuck in the past. While leaving Williamsburg was a bittersweet experience, we know we’ll make plenty of new memories in Norfolk and are already enjoying the different resources it has to offer. But I’m glad I made this painting, because we both needed to take the time to honor this most recent chapter in our lives.