apology

This was one of the other pieces I made around the early part of the 21st C.  The slide is dated 2003.  The other thing that began to happen while this work was germinating was I became desperately homesick.  I wanted to be back home in Nantasket.  Living in the midwest had always seemed difficult but at this time it became very hard.  I used painting as an escape from my physical place and sank deeper into nostalgia and my work.  Everything around me was a reminder of where I wasn't.  Yet I knew I couldn't afford to live the way I could in the midwest and after all what would I do back east?  Then it struck me again that I was born a creative laborer, and I'd probably be working in a ship yard mending someone else's boat. I could paint, so I thought I could be a painter in a shipyard.  This is when I made the transition from traditional oil paints to boat paints. The boat paints were very sexy: amazing leveling ability, bright and candy colored.  They were made to be masked as well.
So again, I was interested in using this tacit knowledge of place to say something.  I had been towing around this copy of the Blue Jacket Manual since I was a Sea Cadet in the Navy when I was 10 or 11 years old.  I started thumbing through it and came across a lot of very useful information.  I really loved the illustrations on how to fold clothing, but never had a use for it.  But I used the nautical alphabet to spell out F O R G I V E M E.  The painting reads from top left down and to the right. Each of the elements are 11" square.  It's a fairly big piece once it's assembled.
The idea for the piece was really simple.  I wanted to apologize to all the people I grew up with for leaving and for wanting to leave the place that we all came to know each other.  I mean, so much of who I am is because of this tiny coastal New England town. I started to think in terms of metaphysics too.  We were all bound together in space and time.  There was something immutable about the experience.  I felt that I had somehow betrayed the first group of people that I knew and loved, and that that betrayal somehow still caused me pain.  I felt that as we aged it was shameful I wasn't there to help the people I knew through the process.  The painting was a public declaration of a spiritual and ethical problem.