After the death of my dad, I felt like I understood his art more. Not necessarily the meaning of them, but more of the processes and what he had been absorbing whilst making them.

Seeing some prints mirroring the shapes of the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge the same year that I visited there. The word “meow” appearing at the top of a painting not long after I was joking around incessantly making cat noises. My dad adamantly denied that it said the word meow, I’ll let you decided upon that. The antique wallpaper we discovered together when stripping nine layers of wallpaper in my childhood bedroom, that my dad used snippets of in prints. Photos of his family, and especially reference to the women he admired. The references to the historical connection of women and fire, the joint research we did, and the photos I took for him of old fireplaces.

I remember knowing about most of these things whilst he was still alive but the connections have become ever clearer since he died.

At first it was daunting looking at his work, I wasn’t sure how I would feel both emotionally and what my opinions on his work would be, I knew there would be a lot I hadn’t seen before as he worked every single day. I have discussed in a previous post the feeling of not enjoying some pieces in some moments. I also know there are some people who struggle to spend much time with the work after their loved one had died because it is too overwhelming. But perhaps it’s the increased exposed I’ve had living in his studio, putting his work up in the restaurant, and going through it, but I feel like I’ve had the time to enjoy recognising the moments and experience that went into certain pieces. The connection to interests of me and my sister that he was obviously thinking of when working. The impact of the interactions, the literature, the culture and news that he experienced.

I don’t need to know the meaning or understand what he was aiming for to find a connection to the process of what he was doing at the time of making them, and to me that is far more valuable.