reflections on grief & art

[ID: White text on a background of blue and green. The background is a photo of a painting by Black artist Frank Bowling, titled “Penumbra” (1970). The part of the painting shown is made of greens and blues. The text (author’s own) says Grief does not honor time. Rather, it highlights it. End ID.]

Grief does not honor time. Rather, it highlights it.

Last night I was thinking about a painting called “Penumbra”, which I viewed over the summer. In August, I went to Guyanese-British abstract painter Frank Bowling’s exhibition at the SFMOMA. In his exhibition titled Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966–1975, “Penumbra”—part of a series called “map paintings”—was the one that spoke to me the most.

[…] Bowling began his career in London and visited Guyana before arriving in New York in 1966, where he participated in critical debates around abstract painting and the role of Black cultural identity in artistic practices.

Drawing from his own transnational journeys and connections, Bowling developed major bodies of work in New York including his oceanic “map paintings,” with hazy stencils of continents and silkscreened family photos. He created color-soaked abstract compositions that reflect watery landscapes from Guyana, London, and New York and made his dynamic process-driven “poured paintings” using a tilting platform to create dazzling compositions. A group of recent paintings made in his London studio show how his work today continues his decades-long experimentation drawing from his family history and transnational experiences, revealing vital intergenerational and globally relevant histories of art. (sfmoma.org)

All of his work was incredible, but it was his map paintings that held me the most. Not only massive in scale, to me, they made room for so many emtions and realities of movement.

And while thinking about “Penumbra”, I was reflecting on how grief and memory intersect, how both travel between, and with, cultures, families, people, and places; how both are transposed onto the body (even when there’s no physical knowledge of it): movement. The fact that grief does not care about how long it’s been. This past week was a very dear, dear, loved one’s birthday and also the anniversary of their passing; subsequently it was hard. How pain rocks us to our core. How those we love are always, always, gone too soon. How loss is sometimes visited upon us unexpectedly; how so much of our grief—especially as Black people—is denied acknowledgment by survival and fear, by the remnants of colonialism, by legacy, by having to live life like it weighs less than it does. Never really wanting to take the space to feel it, because then we’d have to feel it. And then what? And then, if we take the time to feel it, we might know ourselves a little more honestly.

Throughout the week I learned how to sit in the space of not being able to change the past but being grateful for the truths it continues to show me; that no connection is truly lost which is remembered; and how life and movement are never just about grief, they’re also about love, and determination, and dreaming.