Gordon Fearey

History watercolors

I gravitate to time-traveling, which can be induced by standing next to a redwood or going below deck in a 19th Century whaling vessel.

Here, I engage with my grandmother who corresponded with her mother in the early 1900s. I hear her voice and imagine her as a young girl — years before she grew up and married and gave birth to my mother and stored these letters in a box tied with a ribbon. I feel the futile poignancy, or poignant futility, of these scraps of paper, that neither she nor her daughter — my mother — paid much attention to while they were alive. I’m struck by the oddity of painting on them, and my discomfort doing that, which destroys them as correspondence but also establishes them as something else. Yet, I value the experience of quietly connecting with a part of my grandmother’s life before I knew her at all.