Jen Fabish

Years ago, I lived for a while in a small town in Kansas. Over a decade later, I found myself looking back at that time through a haze of intense nostalgia.  In late 2017, I envisioned a series of representational landscapes documenting those memories. I’d mistakenly bought a substrate called Claybord, and couldn’t control the paint on this surface in the way I wanted. In a fit of frustration, I smeared a blob of Cadmium Red all over a painting. As it dried, the guilt set in and I tried removing it, scrubbing with a wet, stiff brush, and scraping with a palette knife. That’s when things got interesting.

The process that developed from there involves layering watercolor and acrylic, and scrubbing, scrapping and chipping to remove select areas while the paint is at various stages of dryness. Sometimes the scraping just blurs the surface. Sometimes I scrape back to past layers, or all the way down to the clay. Through successive iterations of layering and removing, the painting takes me where it will. 

What began as a frustrated attempt to paint my memories evolved into a meditation on the subjectivity, permeability, fragility, and layered nature of memory itself. How does nostalgia color what we remember? What, if anything, fills the holes in our memories that inevitably develop over time? How does the near constant exposure to the shared images of others impact how we remember? What do we find when we dig below the surface?

On one level, these paintings are a love letter to Kansas, one that is tattered, faded, and stained with the patina of longing for a time that no longer exists, or may never have existed as I now remember it. They also represent the memories of others that have blended with mine through repeated viewings of photos on social media. Ultimately, they’re an amalgam of many experiences and places, and sometimes I’m unable to recognize the place where I end up. But, as Kansas taught me, the destination is what matters the least.

In March of 2021—a year into the global pandemic—I randomly bought a package of 6”x 6” gesso boards with no idea what I was going to do with them. On a whim, I sat down one night and started on a small painting of my apartment’s kitchen sink stacked with a few of my favorite (dirty) dishes. After I finished, I started painting a slice of its tiny side yard. It was then that I recognized I was engaged in a gratitude practice.

This small, nearly 100 year-old apartment, one unit of a 1920s duplex, is far and away from the American Dream. Within its walls, I am a tenant. It cracks and sags more each year under the weight of age and prolonged neglect. Its ailments are light years beyond my rudimentary bandaging skills, though I try. Yet, despite how little I can do for it, this apartment has kept me safe and sheltered during a time when life became so terribly precarious and unsafe for so many. It was a familiar and peaceful refuge even as the landscape of the world seemed to change overnight, and the background noise of uncertainty and fear was constantly droning. Long before the pandemic, I spent some of the most painful years of my adult life in this apartment. And later some of the most healing. After I finished the side yard, I decided to paint a picture for each of its remaining rooms. A record of this strange time to be sure, but more so a thank you—a heartfelt nod to the care and kindness of home, wherever that may be.