This Time, It's Personal

Geez, now that I've crossed the boundaries of anonymity, why not tell you a little more about me? I stayed up really late last night looking at some of my artwork. This is a piece I did about my mom. After some re-calculating in the wee hours, I realized that she died at the same age that I am right now ("TICK TOCK", says B and yikes, he's right). At 33, she was considerably older than the norm when she had me back in the Fifties. My father was 43. This is the downside to waiting to have kids. A lot of the time you never stick around to see them grow up, which is what happened in my case. My mom was a really smart person. She had a couple of degrees in economics and briefly taught at Ohio State. I never realized how exceptional she was until much later. I didn't get to know her very well, because she was sick from the time I was five and spent the next 17 years in and out of various hospitals. She must have had an incredible constitution, because she outlived everyone else in our family, finally giving it up on Christmas Day when I was 22. Yeah, I know.....very sad. This piece is called "What Would You Do - If All Your Dreams Came True?" It's done in the style of a Mexican folk art retablo, or portable altar.
What makes it remarkable for me is the fact that the image I used is not my mother's picture, but one that I found in a copy of Zoom magazine and yet it is completely her, right down to the haircut and the little bangs. The day I found it, I began work on the piece and kept at it non-stop until it was done. Last night I spent a lot of time just looking at it; thinking about her and the fact that from time to time, I've created some pretty good stuff. Like me, my mother had a lot of unrealized artistic potential. She didn't have the opportunity, and I've spent way too much time wasting mine. The older I get, the more I've come to physically resemble her. We shared the same name, too. By living my life the way that I do; punctuated by these occasional bursts of creativity, I'd like to think I'm doing some of the things that she didn't have a chance to and in some small way I'm keeping our connection intact and alive.