Two in Arcadia
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When I was growing up no object was more revered by my mother than the book given to her on Valentine's Day in 1915 by her father. He died just a year and 9 months later when she was five years old. I would learn many years later my grandfather killed himself with a razor drawn across his throat, gruesomely facing a mirror. He was distraught over the divorce papers that had been drawn up against him. By the time I learned of it, I had seen the single photograph of my grandfather at his wedding to my grandmother, and noted the strong resemblance to my own features. Perhaps because of this, my mother shared the lurid story as a special confidence between us, never mentioning it to my sisters. Some of my earliest memories are those of her reading poems from the book and showing me the pictures. The poems were full of longing, an emotion written on my mother's face as she read them out.
In this homage replica, I altered the images to conform with how I remembered them, or re-envisioned the subjects to resonate with my own personal history. I rendered setting sun behind a palm tree to resemble a memorable red moon at dawn as it set into the Pacific Ocean in Guerrero. For Lucine’s lilies I substituted yellow flowers I had seen at El Charco outside my new city of San Miguel de Allende. I replaced Lucine’s hollyhocks with Delphiniums I had loved when I lived in our ”painted lady” cottage in Houston Heights. For the seagulls on the title page I substituted white-faced ibis (Plegadis chihi) that fly over my Mexican home by the hundreds in giant V’s. I brought in tall fir trees that were so prominent in my fathers photographs at Holden Washington from the 1940’s. |
