How does one paint a home?
The house was the last place I had left to complete, and what I thought would be the easiest place to paint became the hardest. The house is something so familiar to me, the place where I had stayed all my life. Yet this very familiarity was what made me stumble in my study of it – how can one contain all the memories and stories not just from one’s life, but all that has passed through three generations?
This was the house my grandfather and grandmother raised my mother and uncle, the house where my grandparents and parents raised me, the house I grew up in, left in the fall and returned to in the summer. It was the place where I used to live with five other family members for the first sixteen years of my life, and three others for the past four years before I left for Stanford. It’s the house I slept in the warm embrace of my mother and grandmother during my childhood years, where I rode my tricycle in circles around the front porch, where I laboured through my paintings in high school, studied till the wee hours of the morning on my desk, slept in almost every night of my life.
The same house my mother and uncle grew up and lived in, and the same house my grandparents selected when they returned to Singapore after their studies in the United Kingdom.
How does one capture all these perceptions and narratives of home?
I brought my woes to my mentor Lora, an Art History PhD, in hopes of attaining an art historical perspective to investigating and portraying spaces of personal significance. She pointed towards looking back at the origins of the house, seeking advertising material and brochures that may have existed back when my grandparents were seeking a place to stay. Through my scouring through the drawers, I chanced upon a brochure of the neighbourhood back in the 1970s wrapped between the layers of blueprints my grandfather had made for redesigning and renovating the space.
These materials gave greater insight into the eye of my grandfather – the features he looked for not only when acquiring such a place of residence, but also perhaps what he saw within the available housing choices and the ways he could reconstruct them to fully unlock their potential and function. From expanding the front porch to redesigning the kitchen with advice from my grandmother, the blueprints and brochures allowed me to see the progression and evolution of the house from its original form to its current state.
I spent my time drawing features scattering the house from the doorknob in my room, the staircase bridging the first floor to the second, the wooden floorboard, the spirals upon the gate and more.
Yet when it came to creating the composition, I found myself taking a wholly different approach. Drawing inspiration from Kevin Arpel, I created a minimalist approach to painting the house, endeavouring to emulate the clinical and mechanical approach within the blueprints as I tilted my ruler at all possible angles, confusing myself more with each line I drew.
Looking back at the composition, I wouldn't necessarily say that I am wholly satisfied with the final product. Rather, I saw this painting as the blueprint for future works – it was the foundation upon which it was to be built, the empty rooms awaiting the memories to fill their spaces, the stories told and to be written.