PEELING BACK TIME
Egg Tempera
28 x 40 inches
Private Collection
“My Father was never a packrat like I am. One of the items that fell victim to his overzealous pursuit of eliminating things that he deemed unnecessary was a suitcase which had accompanied our family on our yearly August vacations. This suitcase was adorned with the decals which chronicled some of the places we visited during the first vacations I can remember from my childhood. It was on these earliest trips that I developed my habit of collecting things found along the way. The first items I can remember collecting were the colorful caps from soda pop bottles. I literally had a shopping bag full from one trip alone.
From the time I realized this “Suitcase Full Of Memories” had been thrown out in the garbage, I had a burning desire to recreate it in a painting. This led me to collect any old suitcase I could find which reminded me of our early piece of luggage. Whether I found it set out for the garbage, at a yard sale or an auction or flea market, I would add it to my visual library of suitcases in an effort to recreate the color and texture of what I remembered ours looking like. To this I added decals which I would find in the boxes of postcards offered for sale in antique shops and from the duplicates of some of them that my mother had stashed in a filing cabinet. Finally I had enough material to make a mockup of the missing piece of my past. The peeling decals, in essence, represented my “Peeling Back Time” to the memories of my youth.”