Storytelling is unpredictable.
I sat down with my sketchbook filled with drawings and notes from the whirlwind seven days of travel. The album on my phone titled Portugal was filled with snapshots of our trip. Beautiful cobblestone streets, citrus trees growing on the sides of road like wildflowers, dusty, hand-painted, vintage dishes that we unearthed in the corners of a factory… hundreds of photos of inspiration at my fingertips, but I knew exactly what my next series would be. I wanted to recreate the tiles from the lounge where we stayed our first two nights abroad.
Any corner of that hotel could easily have inspired ten collections. The Pergola Hotel was like stepping into a fairy tale. Bougainvillea climbing the tiled exterior of the old house with blooms bigger than my head. Vibrant fuschia flowers contrasted on the hand-painted motifs of the tile. The front garden was intoxicating and begged you not to leave through the front gate to wander the seaside town of Cascais. Inside the front door was a beautiful staircase that led to a second floor, every surface covered in ironwork and marble. Down the narrow upstairs hall, through an archway that opened into one of the most beautifully intimate rooms I've ever been in.
When the Hotel had been a home, this was a living room of sorts… a beautiful brass chandelier hanging from the ceiling, an imposing fireplace centered on the wall… both worthy of more lengthy description, but they were not the stars of this room. The showstopper was the walls. Five-inch tiles covered almost every surface. Each a tiny jewel with a hand-painted figure with no rhyme or reason for its placement. All around the room were paintings of farmers, rabbits, birds, flowers, dogs, creatures of unknown origins… we were surrounded by a storybook full of mismatched characters telling quite a defunct tale. In a state of jet-lagged stupor, I found myself sitting in that room connecting figures across the room, telling their stories for them.
And that's how it started.
Creating separate paintings in the style of azulejos, as I later found out the tiles were called, but framing them together so that they start the path of “the story”. Because that’s what we are searching for. The story.
Making connections when there may not be any. It’s what we as humans strive for… making sense of the chaos. But that was just a start.
I knew that I wanted the collection to be more than just a series of paper squares, so I took some of those tiles and explored their stories a little deeper. I started a series of canvases that began to use composition and contrast to tell the narratives that were developing in my mind. For me, those stories were about the simplicity of life I found in Portugal. The scenes were pastoral. Predictable. Comfortable. I developed them from sketches on a page, explored the complexity of color I could get from only using blue tones, composed them on canvas, and began pouring myself into the collection.
But predictable stories can sometimes have a twist, and that’s where I found myself about a week ago. You may not realize it, but artists can spend a lot of time alone. It was during one of those alone days when I was sitting back from these eight canvases, looking at them as a body of work.
They weren’t about Portugal at all.
Stepping back from them, I realized they were memories from my childhood, and they were all about my dad.
I wasn’t painting portraits of him necessarily, but every piece was tied back to a memory I had with him. Growing up, my dad worked in the oil field on the production side of things. He would leave on a Tuesday night, travel out by boat or helicopter to the rigs, work all week, and come back home the following Wednesday.
Seven and Seven. Gone a week. Home a week.
It was a schedule that probably wasn’t perfect for most families… but it worked for us. The beauty of that schedule was when my dad was home… he was home.
And just like that, like stories often do, this one became personal. The story I thought I was telling about a culture of people who live 4,500 miles away, became a story of my own life and the treasured memories I have with my dad. A story that celebrates him.
And that is what I love about this work. The weeks of preparation that led up to my realization were subconsciously building up to a twist. What I originally thought was a documentation of a beautiful experience, shifted and became relatable to me in a whole new way.
It’s the power of art. It’s the power of story. These works are very personal to me now… but I love that they can also tell your story, maybe spark a memory that you may need to dust off… because these paintings aren’t about Portugal at all.