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John A. Rhodes

I've Lost You

Updated: Dec 7, 2021


My dad was a single parent so I sent A LOT of time with my great grandma; She will be 102 years old this year. Her story is fascinating, but this painting wasn't made to tell her story, but mine.


During the holiday season of 2019, I went back home to visit. My dad and I went to see my great-grandma, and that was the first time we realized that dementia had started to set in. She kept referring to my dad as his dad, and to me as my dad.


The pain I felt of being forgotten was nothing compared to the pain of watching my great-grandma, the woman who raised me, suffer through not-knowing. She was a rock, a constant source of comfort. She symbolized home and stability and everything that I knew growing up. Seeing her this way sent me down a dark spiral of too many realizations that the Home I had always known was just an idea that I was holding on to. Just like I had changed, for better or worse, it had too. I still considered Home to be my family living within blocks of each other, all getting together on Sunday afternoons, walking through leaves to my best friend's house daily, building tree forts in neighboring yards, zipping a black band hoodie up all the way to keep out the cold while walking to the spot to smoke cigarettes, my great grandma always having a freshly baked chocolate or lemon cake made, rolls in the bread box, frogs and crickets making the southern heat feel suffocatingly loud , skipping class to swim at my grandparents' pool, shucking corn and beans, my bedroom walls covered in posters and drawings, blazing up in the Blazer, duet musicals in front seats with Ashleigh, drunken house shows, late night phone calls...


The interior of my dad's house burnt and was completely flipped in 2012 extinguishing any record of my bedroom's brown shag carpet, band posters, early art work, computer desk that everyone who ever visited had to sign. Not only has Ashleigh grown up and started her own family, but the house I walked to so often belongs to a new family. The glittering, baby blue Blazer that I drove is long been scrapped. My family has moved all over. I have moved away, gotten two degrees, gotten married, started my career... My great grandma has all , but stopped cooking for herself because she forgets to turn the burners off. She needs help bathing and making her bed. She isn't doing crosswords daily or reading murder mysteries or shooting squirrels with a BB gun out of her pecan tree. The Home I always knew only existed then and there, was a ghost in my head and sadly, didn't/ doesn't exist anymore. The concept of Home has shifted and grown, become something new. I have built my own adult version, but that comfortable place of childhood, adolescence, of first loves and losses; that place of becoming and learning is gone forever.


To start this piece, I knew I wanted simple imagery to symbolize home so the house shape was cut into the canvas. Next, I took my journals & poetry from middle and high school, ripping them up and gessoing them onto the canvas. I did my usual drip painting technique on top of the gessoed writings, choosing blues and blacks to create a somber, sad and nostalgic feel. I decided to incorporate embroidery because my great grandma taught me to sew and in a weird way textiles have always made me feel close to her/ reminded me of her. I embroidered a puddle of sorts to represent the tears that were shed, but also the feeling of these ideas of Home melting away.



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