This week I am moving the majority of my dad’s paintings to my mum’s flat.

The paintings were stacked over three levels of shelving; they didn’t really have much of an order to them when I stacked them. However, what I noticed was that there was a particular theme going through the top layer of paintings, and this was that they were very dark. They were dark, not only in colour but also in the sense I got from them, for example, dark red strokes that I imagined looked possibly like figures fighting. I noticed that they were all more or less painted around the same time. A time I do remember my dad being a little frustrated, perhaps.

In hindsight of yesterday, I’ve realised that I was feeling quite down, but not in the usual way I sometimes have when sorting his stuff. There was a little cloud, despite the fact that I otherwise felt fine with the task. The thing is, I was not only moving paintings to my mum’s, I was also choosing paintings to be put up in a restaurant. So I was now aware of how I was not only seeing the paintings in terms of how I felt about them, but also the mood they might create in the space I was trying to fill.

On the shelf below, I discovered brightly coloured pieces, and this was when I realised the cloud that had been previously hanging over me. The dark pieces had affected me intensely for two main reasons. My preference is bright or bold colours, or earthy tones. I had also put a criterion of critique on the paintings that wasn’t how I would have seen them before; I was accidentally letting the fear of people not liking my dad’s work take over the sentiment of the day. It’s a feeling we are all going to experience if we’re given the responsibility of doing something with our loved one’s work. In my mind, it’s kind of because the person who made the art has almost become like our child now, because they are no longer able to represent themselves, and we want people to see that our pride in them is on merit, not just because they are our child.

Having spoken to a couple of friends about how I was feeling, I took away two things in particular from what they said. Firstly, I said how I was feeling about the darker works, but also I was starting to wonder what to do with the works I was sure were unfinished; the only word I could find to describe it was that I felt weird. I was told, embrace the weird, it’s not like my dad left clear instructions on what to do with his work. So interpret them as you will, basically. Secondly, I was told, well, if the paintings gave me an extreme feeling, then aren’t they doing their job?!