Tree Scroll 5

You stand before it and feel the vertigo first—something about the way the figures climb and fall simultaneously, the way the tower at center seems to grow downward as much as up. This is a painting about the weight of inherited memory, about the stories that seep through generations like water through limestone. The pink is the pink of flesh seen through closed eyelids, of old photographs bleached by decades of light, of the inside of the mouth when speaking words you learned before you knew their meaning. Figures process across the surface in pilgrimage toward something unnamed. They gather at the base of the structure in postures of supplication or protest—it becomes impossible to distinguish one from the other. The work carries the temporal confusion of dreams where you are simultaneously child and ancestor, where buildings you have never visited feel like home. There is violence here, suggested in the rust-colored stains that pool at the lower register, but also tenderness in the delicate linework that traces each figure into being. The artist has painted not a scene but a condition—the condition of existing within history, of being made from the accumulated residue of everyone who came before.