Bone Blog & Small intentions

A New Week, small intentions and a painting that stayed

A new week often brings plans — a write up in my bone blog about adjustments, repairs, small intentions. This one begins with a painting I made long before my son was born. I was 19 at the time, i remember that time well.

By my standards now, it isn’t a good painting. The drawing was intentionally naïve, the logic loose, the decisions unrefined. I can see exactly where I was when I made it and i recall the sense of Matisse style inspiration that filled my young mind/spirit and drove my paintbrush at the time.

Those days, what I didn’t know, what I couldn’t yet resolve, had to come later.

And yet i kept it. Now, 35 years later it was still here under a pile of other paintings in the studio.

I've retouched it lightly. Not to improve it or correct it, but to care for it. To stabilize what time has worn thus sending it forward intact and not rewritten.

It hung in our home throughout Simon's childhood. It hung there for years, never explained, moved occasionally, present wherever it was placed, while life moved forward around it. It absorbed years without comment — ordinary days, growing pains, laughter, fatigue. It became part of the background fabric of our home. At some point I took it down, dismantled the frame and stuffed it behind a batch of other "put aside" paintings, besides somehow it got torn....

You can see there is a tear in the painting at the base of the vase.

Now, 14 years later, Simon has bought his own apartment — one he saved steadily toward since leaving school, he's turns 30 this coming May, and keen to furnish it. So he roamed the house the last time he dropped in and asked for this and that to which i said yes and yes. He chose a few things to take with him to his new space. Not the most valuable, but the most familiar. The things that reminded him of a childhood, a childhood he reflected, passed too quickly.

He remembered the painting i could not remember where i had put it but we found it.

I've retouched it lightly. Not to improve it or correct it, but to care for it. To stabilize what time has worn thus sending it forward intact and not rewritten. I could not fix the tear in it seen at the base of the vase.

There’s something quietly instructive in this moment. A painting I no longer stand behind as work has become an emotional artifact for Simon. It reminds me that art doesn’t always function as a statement. Sometimes it functions as a witness.

This week feels like that — a continuation rather than a revision. A familiar painting, moving on.

A once lived moment stepping forward.