Oil on plywood (2009).
In 2011, my brother and I visited our grandmother’s grave after many years and found the marker was tiny, just the size of my palm. It was all the family could afford at the time; but knowing how large a presence she had and continued to have in our lives, my brother insisted we buy her a new marker, more representative of how we felt about her. On it, we put angels for those she had seen during her passing, as well as these lines from her favorite poem: Ame, fui amado, el sol acarició mi faz. ¡Vida, nada me debes! ¡Vida estamos en paz! ‘I loved and was loved. I felt the sun caress my face. Life, you owe me nothing. Life, we are at peace.’
The painting is a representation of this impulse we had to honor her memory, and to say something of how she continues to live on in our lives, ‘dancing on her grave.’ The pose of the figure comes from a newspaper photo taken of my grandmother when she was in her eighties, after having demonstrated the Mexican hat dance (jarabe tapatío), while wearing that very dress and sombrero. I believe the caption read, ‘Margarita kicks up her heels!’
Oil on canvas (2013).