This painting is based on an 8 x10 color photograph of Ericsson’s mother, taken by his father in Atlanta, Georgia in 1977. It is the artist’s first painting since 2002.

According to Ericsson, “the thing that helped me begin and even finish the painting, among many things, was Arshile Gorky’s Painting, The Artist and His Mother 1926–c. 1936 the same version in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. I kept reproductions of it and studies he made for it taped to the wall beside me as I worked. I’ve known and loved that painting since my early twenties. Gorky also used a photographic reference, and also depicted himself as a child with his deceased mother. Gorky died by suicide. And his mother, a refugee, starved to death. Since we can’t control many of the horrible things that might happen to us, what we do have and to a degree what we can take hold of and leave to those who come after us, is our stories. Which is why I write this here, there’s a story to be unearthed, a life and lives to be unearthed and considered, because it is true what Socrates was thought to have said the unexamined life is not worth living.

I had the painting stretched the other day (March 29th), seeing it completed for the first time I was overcome by emotion which rarely happens to me regarding my own work. It was emotion without thought, but as I did think about it and as the day wore on I thought about the tremendous amount of guilt I felt after my mother died, as if leaving her and pursuing my art contributed to her death. Painting, at that time, seemed increasingly egotistical to me, an end in and of itself, a vacuum of carelessness, a distraction from my engagement and responsibility to others. Quitting painting, but not art, I started using other tools to tell another story, to tell her story/our story. I think with all that and seeing the painting stretched, the two of us there memorialized, I felt like I got something back that I’d lost. And not just the return to painting, which apparently I do love to do. This work, each day I worked on it, gave me great pleasure, but also in a ghostly sense it got the two of us back together again. This couldn’t have been far from Gorky’s mind either. That incredible thing art can do, following its own invented script, it can still, quiet, or for a time seem to defeat the things that annihilate us. Namely the passage of time and/or whatever tragedies may come to us in time. A work of art, a painting, has the potential to put something together again, time can be turned back, and the small space of painted canvas hung on a wall becomes window-like, a view to home for a fugitive soul.