Long before she passed away, I told my Mom and brothers that her art was mine when she died. It was done in tongue-in-cheek naïveté: I didn’t claim to have an actual stake in the art, it was a non-binding calling of dibs. I certainly didn’t think she was going to die anytime soon anyway. Whoopsie-doopsie on my part.
With an absolute minimum of guilt, I got the art anyway. My oldest brother had no qualms with dispensing it to me, and the fact that I did most of the work cleaning out her house, and all the other assorted bullshit that came with it, meant I had a strong claim (my brothers are the best, they never would’ve cared. It’s just weird dividing stuff up like that.)
Sometime around 2009 my Mom, recently settled in New Mexico, bought a massive, 6 foot x 6 foot, painting/sculpture by the Santa Fe artist Carlos Estrada Vega. It’s comprised of 2 inch squares, 1296 of them, painted in a whole range of colors. Each wooden square has a small magnet on the back, and the frame itself is a very thin piece of galvanized steel for the magnets to hold onto.
Each square could be moved and sorted over and over again. They may have been arranged in a certain way at the beginning, but part of the fun of the piece was that you could play around with it. My Mom would find it annoying when my little brother and I started messing around too much, but it’s not like the spirit of the piece was ever compromised: it was supposed to be random, changeable.
When it was time to get the piece from Santa Fe to Dallas, I had to break it all down; it took about two hours. I couldn’t fit it all in the truck any other way. While that felt a little weird, to just disassemble this thing that meant so much to me, I had a flash of inspiration as I drove overnight through west Texas: it’s already random, disassembling it made it more random, let’s fuck around with it. My guilt that I, and I alone, would have the whole piece led me to an idea: I could break it all apart, no one could stop me.
Picture a tic-tac-toe board: in this case the 6-foot-square was turned into 9 2-foot-squares. I had 9 steel sheets made, and over a few weeks my wife and I would pull the little squares out of the boxes and re-assemble the whole thing, just this time fragmented. I have three brothers, so they each got two squares and I kept three, my artist’s commission. I didn’t have the whole thing to myself anymore, but it felt good that all 4 of us had a little bit. It’s certainly a little sappy, but I think she would be happy and proud of what I did.
The 3 squares I have now are my favorite thing, beautiful beyond words. They scratch the geometry itch, and the history and meaning and love behind them give me so much. I don’t move the little squares around as much anymore, but it remains this super-adaptable memory of my Mom; it’s something I can touch and handle to feel closer to her.
The house I rent in Boulder has an old, filled-in well on the property. When we moved in it just had this rotten wooden circle on top. Very quickly I realized there was the potential to mimic another one of my Mother’s colorful passions. Her house in Santa Fe had these two gigantic terra cotta urns in the front. She’d plant nasturtium or some pretty green thing in the spring, but when the cold came in she’d empty most of the dirt out and start assembling her yarn balls.
She never said where the idea came from. I think it was just a lark one day. A few days after Thanksgiving she’d mound all the balls up in the urns and tie them down. Santa Fe doesn’t really do Christmas lights, they have these lights called farolitos instead. I think the yarn balls were her attempt at offsetting the endless adobe with a little more color.
So my wife and I spent a month doing the same thing, sitting on the couch spinning yarn balls and watching reality TV. Once we made enough (I think 130-150, some small some large), I rigged together some mesh over the well and tied all the yarn balls down. They’ve been in my yard for about 9 months now. Crazy Colorado wind has blown a few away, and all the sun and rain has muted some of the color; we’re planning on replacing a lot of the balls this Winter to jazz things up. When I’m working in the front yard people will stop and chat about it, or yell something nice as they drive by. In line at the grocery store someone noticed the tattoo on my calf and made the connection. This last May, on her birthday, three separate people stopped to say how beautiful it was (kinda trippy).
It’s funny that a part of my Mom’s artistic legacy (just a small part) is COLOR!!!! Squares and balls, arranged at random, the result being COLOR!!!!
A legacy of crazy-intense vibrancy is perfect. I miss her everyday.