Don't let me kid you with that curt little title. This painting is named like it doesn't mean enough to give it a real name, is named like I hardly care. I only know that if I had to find a real title for this first painting of my dear dead dog boy, it would be something too heartbreaking.
This painting is another in the series of Remembrances. Jake. I loved him extremely when he was alive. After his death, the most ridiculous moments were cause for exaltation. This painting catches Jake in that moment, while he's been resting, his back leg all flopped over in ease, distracted in his meditation on nothing at all, when he feels the squirming of what might possibly be a flea. His slightly worried brow reveals his nearly disturbed revery.
Jake was large on revery. He lived in nap time. He taught me to take my best naps in the box of sunlight that shown through skylights and windows. These were naps timed by the shadow that caught up with us as the sun moved across the sky. These naps were taken with my head on his fleshy pillow of a ribcage. If it was a really good nap, we'd awake side-by-side all paw and arm entwined, drooly. Jake was such a good and great dog.
This is the first painting I started with a charcoal drawing. You can see my struggle to find his shape, the tilt of his head. The color and shade is all about my move from sculpture to painting, trying to work out the direction of dark and light. Jake was a black lab, not yellow. I couldn't paint a black dog because dead, there was not black dog in this world anymore. Yellow was a bit sweet and light-filled, the color I needed to face this reflection on his leave-taking.
Jake's white face is the heart of this painting. Those are the tender eyes Jake used on me many times over our nine years together. Those are his smart, attentive ears. That is his thick tail, the one he wrapped around my legs when he would just curl up from love, the one he'd whack me with, so full of joy and fun. Oh a good, good dog. Fourteen years now since I had that dog, that dear Jake dog and still I am so full of his life, reaping the benefit of having known him.
There are two themes contained in this painting that I find throughout my work. The white face Jake is wearing is one I've naturally arrived at, in reference to death, numerous times in performance art and in other paintings. Unwittingly I find that death wears a white face.
Also apparent, in the paintings and sculpture I made of and in reference to Jake, is my confusion about his shape as a dog. There are elements too human. I find this intermingling of dog and human traits carries over to observations and an understanding I have of myself as a sort of dog girl. Jake has taught me to find endearing, traits in myself that I might have denigrated before I knew this wise old dog.
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