Is there true happiness in the present tense, or only in the memory of things? My current work examines the ephemerality of happiness. I’m concerned with the want to hold on to it, and whether this is possible or if it only exists in memory. I believe what’s at the heart of these questions is the haunted nature of the human condition, that is, the paradox of being fully alive yet finite.
This work started as an exploration of the feelings of joy and nostalgia. Why, when looking back at the joy of experiencing life with a young child, is there a feeling of grief that seems to sit alongside it? It’s a feeling of poignancy, a sort of nostalgia of the present. At the same time, I also became very interested in images of my own childhood and which of these moments seemed important to me now. Things that I hadn’t thought about in years: swinging with my dad at a playground, birthday parties in the backyard, picnics and pinatas. These were the images that stood out to me and I felt like needed to be painted, in a way to immortalize them, to make them not seem so ephemeral. These were suddenly the most important memories of my childhood. My interests then began to include images of my young son at creative play, hiking, on road trips. In exploring this with my work, I’m trying to find if preserving seemingly mundane moments in attentively painted images can allow one to hold on to that feeling, while at the same time remind the viewer that it won’t last long, and to look for and pay attention to this in their own life. An expert on nostalgia, Dr. Clay Routledge (2021) writes, “(nostalgia) tends to follow a redemptive sequence in which negative feelings such as longing and loss give way to positive feelings such as happiness, social connectedness, gratitude, and hope.” I believe my point in making this work is to provoke this progression in the viewer.
My process starts by sorting through images I take daily of ordinary moments that address this concatenation in a visual way. I’m looking for images that embody a feeling of happiness and grief coexisting in a moment that’s at once joy and loss, time passing. I paint abstracted backgrounds first then use the images as reference, leaving out some parts or merging with others so the final product feels more like a constructed memory than a snapshot. The end result is a meticulously painted image of an ordinary moment of an ordinary day, that conveys a sense of joy and the feeling that it’s just about to fall out of one’s grasp.
*Routledge, C. (2021). ‘The Surprising Power of Nostalgia at Work, Harvard Business Review, 26 April. Available at: https://hbr.org/2021/04/the-surprising-power-of-nostalgia-at-work (Accessed: 7 March 2023).
b. 1979
Education
2003 B.A. Visual Art (Studio) UCSD
JP lives and works in San Diego, California.