TR Ericsson

“Tom & Sue” began with the source photo for the painting “Angel of the Morning” and builds around it. This work is a dialogue between Ericsson and his memory. A mother’s letters to her son. A son’s letters to his mother. Photographs and memories, fragments of dreams, notes and ideas, passages from books or songs, all of it now suspended in a cocktail of ashes and graphite and resin, spilled alcohol and cigarette burns; a chaotic, even disorienting map of time, place, people and cultural connotations. Once completed the work was drenched in cheap alcohol and dried in the sun. Lit cigarettes were left to fall onto it, as if forgotten in an ashtray until they slipped off the table to leave their mark. The stains intensify in the humidity of the booze, an unpredictable choreography of love and abuse. Like Rumi, the Persian poet writes, “we drink people, they drink us.” What and who are we after we’ve drunk one another? Living or dead, the intoxicating impact of love goes on.