I painted John’s Star in San Francisco during the final year of my MFA. I had just received a call that my father had fallen off his bike drunk and was taken to the hospital in NJ unconscious, clutching a golden coin of Pope John Paul II. I was painting with a tire that I heaved out of the Bay with my brother in law at the time. There were hundreds of tires in the bay stranded at low tide, once agents of motion now stuck. I painted with dozens of rounded bricks harvested from the tidal zone as well - bricks that once were homes, collapsed from earthquakes, hauled out to create the landfill we were standing (living) upon, and now were rounded from the tides. These bricks occurred to me the perfect embodiment of the tidal dance of man and nature, mind and universe.
I painted with a gold pigment that my sister and I found in a magical color store in Venice, which floats like a kilonova upon the water. One brick was filled with blue and became a fundamental point of healing, a place on the wheel where the hidden power shines through or the next world reveals its nature. Soon after, my father woke up. He woke up and committed to sobriety in a way that shook our world with hope.
