The Nostalgia Collection
This collection has been brewing so long- maybe forever. Last summer, we took the kids to Dad and Patty’s house and had a whole day with my friend, Melissa Read, an incredible photographer with ties in Greensboro and Savannah (SCAD, Just like me!). She photographed us for a neighborhood magazine that featured a story about FPIES back in 2019, and we fell in love with her and the way she tells stories. If you are just finding me, you may not know the FPIES connection. Both of our children suffered from this disease in early childhood, and my daughter had such a severe case that she could only eat two foods until she was nearly three. To say that period of time in our lives was hard is the understatement of the century. It broke me, and then miraculously, food by food, bite by bite, we got our freedoms back when our daughter started eating food without reactions in early 2020. (Yes, just in time for the pandemic!) But anyway, back to Melissa…
Melissa is a documentary photographer. She snaps the photos as she sees them. There’s no airbrushing and no perfect set up-- she just jumps into the thick messy reality of our lives, snapping away to capture and preserve these fleeting moments that can slip by far too fast. Her eye is brilliant- she notices the details that I cherish too and celebrates them big time. I’ve watched her story unfold for a few years and felt so inspired. Last year she lost her father to cancer. Over the summer, she photographed us near my dad’s 70th birthday. The poignancy of that is not lost on us.
For our family, her photographs become precious artifacts of our lives. That idea stuck with me, and I wanted to see where I could take it. What is an artifact, really? Well, for me it’s an object that takes me back to a specific place or time. It’s something with a patina of history and a good story attached. It’s sentimental. It’s human experience attached to the tangible.
To explore this artifact idea, I started making inks from plants in my backyard and then experimented making my own oil paint with the red clay pigment from back home. The homemade oil paint that I used for under paintings in The Nostalgia Collection is from the same soil where Melissa photographed our family. The sentimentality of the iron oxide ties in intimately with my memories of childhood and now of taking my children to the same places. Fireflies in the fields, tadpoles in the creek and the occasional surprise of a crawdad under a watery rock conjure up connections with the people that I love, the locations I’ve called home, and now with the paint that I use.
I’m done denying that I am sentimental, soft, feminine and human. As I approach my 40th birthday (One week from the collection release, actually!), I want to be authentic and intentional about the time that I have on this beautiful planet. It’s raw and full of emotion, yes. It can be absolutely terrible and cruel without reason too, but the flip side of that ugliness is a beauty that connects us all. Whether we see it or not, it’s there. There are hard things that I don’t agree with or understand that happen every single day, but tucked in between the decades of violence, tragedy and politics are the beautiful and humble lives lived, unconditional love given freely and those precious fleeting “little thing” moments that are everything. Does this mean that we are teaching our kids to turn a blind eye to the evil in the world? Absolutely not. I believe that in order to face and change all of that, we need to celebrate and rejuvenate with moments of beauty, truth and art. Once we have found peace, rest, strength and love, we can get back out there again with new focus and integrity.
The Nostalgia Collection is a group of paintings that to me, are breathtakingly beautiful. They remind me of the fleeting nature of life and all the good sentimentality I want to celebrate. I marvel at the soft transition of colors between petals kissed by sunshine, and the gentle skies that are the background to all of our days here on Earth.
I suppose you can call me romantic, or an idealist, but much like Georgia O’Keeffe stopped to notice the flowers, I am pausing to notice beauty and marvel at it, just like my photographer friend, Melissa. Thank goodness she celebrated the beauty of those toddler moments back in 2019. I was too consumed with worry about my daughter and the rare disease called FPIES to be able to enjoy them at the time.
Now that I can look outward again, I see so much more than I did before.
I hope you love these paintings just like I do. They go live on April 20th at 10 a.m. EST for Studio Insiders and at 12 for the public. If you’d like to join my Studio Insider list, just click here.
If you want to see more of Melissa’s work, check out my post about homemade inks here, or Melissa’s website here.
If you’d like to try the backyard acorn cap ink to make your own paintings, click here.