On memory and place

The Ochre series started from a single photograph of my grandmother's kitchen. That yellow — faded by decades of afternoon sun — became the anchor for everything that followed.

I wasn't trying to paint the kitchen. I was trying to paint the feeling of standing in that room at 4pm in summer, when the light was thick and the air smelled like coffee and something baking. Color memory is strange. We don't remember hues accurately; we remember relationships. The yellow next to the white trim. The shadow under the table. The way the linoleum caught the light.

Composition in Ochre took six weeks. I worked in layers, building up and scraping back, until the surface had the right weight. The lower left quadrant has the most built-up texture — I wanted that area to feel like time itself, sedimented, patient. The canvas is 72 × 96 inches because I needed the scale to match the weight of the memory. Small wouldn't have held it.

I'm still not sure if I got it right. But I got closer than I thought I would.