I went to my parents’ home on google.maps and dreamed with of still lifes

In my recent series I would like to process my relationship to my parents’ alcoholism.

In Karl Ove Knausguard’s book Death has a longer description about the house where his alcoholic father lived before he died.I think  maybe my parents may live in a similar place now.

I found the house on google.maps, where I grew up. I painted the house twice, using the picture from google.maps. The photos were taken in 2019. I was there the last time about 9 years ago.The house looks worse than I remember it. The couch and the bed are in a garten. The plaster is crumbled, The balcony railing is loose, failing out in several places. The weed in the garden is as tall as a man.

I have no picture of the inside of the house. I try to find out what is in there. I paint still lifes with hidden bottles. My children destroy the still life, then recompose them with themselves. The past dissolves, blending with the present. Not just my past, but also my children’s too.The glass will be tamed, the past can be told.

I paint under or next to the paintings “footnotes” or “side notes” parallel with the figurative part. Those are the figurative parts of the abstract version. What I can not tell with pictures, appears on the footnotes. Those are imprints of the painting process, the layers appear on it too.

This name (footnote) was inspired by the novel of Péter Esterházy (Termelési regény (kissregény)/Ein Produktionroman (zwei Produktionromane)) Two novels in one book. In a first novel we can find a lot of footnotes, those are the second novell, which is related to the first one.