House Contents Grounds
In its mysterious alchemy, painting arrests our attention, asking us to attend to the familiar appearance of things seen but edging toward invisibility, calling upon the viewer to stop and look, to be blindsided by a sudden shock of recognition. In House Contents Grounds I have sought to recapture a lost time and place. This arose from the unlikely rediscovery, in a box of junk, of a nearly two decades old video tape made on a visit to my ancestral home in Alabama. My grandmother had scrawled upon it “Bill made this” and put it in my suitcase. Because I thought of it then as something made from curiosity at how a camcorder worked, it was packed away and forgotten about. Viewing the imagery again felt like a revelation: something akin to Proust’s Marcel tasting the madeleine. Though the content was mundane, the effect on me was profound, and I set out to place myself, through the act of painting, once again in that long-vanished context.
