They Fill My Eyes

When the news first broke about the Sandy Hook school shootings, I really tried to avoid listening to the media coverage—it often seems we focus on perpetrators over victims. But when they released the names two days later I thought, “I can give attention to this; I can bear witness to this.” I opened the article and saw that it was not a celebration of the lives of 20 children. It was a database listing name, birthdate, gender, and age. In that moment, I knew I had to process the information with art.
 
I created twenty paintings using colors derived from the Myosotis arvensis (Forget-Me-Not) and a geometric numbering system. Each piece is painted with Flashe on a 10" x 10" wood panel and conveys data initially released about the children to the news outlets. Each painting is dedicated to a specific child. The color on each indicates whether the child is a boy or girl. The number of colored segments reflects the child's age. The overall number of segments are placed in eight triangular sections from left to right, top to bottom, and show the child's birthdate. The series title is a line taken from the old Marmalade song, Reflections of My Life.

The paintings are now hanging in the Mosaic Gallery in Pomona and will be there until the end of this month. The gallery is sometimes used as a meeting space, so there was a large number of people in the back room when my friend and fellow artist Dominique Ovalle and I were installing the show. The group came into the gallery during breaks and later for a potluck—and I learned some valuable and interesting things about how we process tragic events like this one.

As I was making the paintings, I felt like I was spending time with each child, getting to know them. Catherine Hubbard and I share the same birthday; Chase Kowalski was born on Halloween. (I wonder if he thought that was awesome or kind of a bummer.) Jack Pinto had the coolest name. What surprised me is that every person I talked to wanted that same kind of time. They wanted to understand my system so they could decipher the paintings and learn something about each child—it was awesome! Bittersweet, but awesome.

Side Note:  The last time I posted on this blog was more than two years ago. I had just started my art quest and was still making “school project art.” A lot has happened since then—I’m entering my fourth and last semester at Claremont Graduate University where I’ve been working on my MFA. I was very lucky to discover early in grad school a way of painting that is authentic to me. I am a conceptual painter whose work often focuses on the models we build to understand the world and ourselves. I use mathematics and geometry to abstract and reanimate statistical data and other information