You Can't Go Home

11x14, acrylic on canvas panel, © 2020

Collection of the Artist

When I was a young person, I would visit a friend on his ranch in Idaho. He lived across the way from his grandfather's house, which this is. I was stricken by the beauty of the place. It seemed placid and cool. There were big cottonwood trees behind the house or to the left which shaded the yard. It had a big front yard in which a band of the Blackfoot Tribe would come and camp. On one occasion we went out to the teepees that were in the front yard, and the women took a piece of paper and drew around my brother's hands and around my feet. In about a week we went back and picked up leather gloves with a beaded gauntlet and moccasins with some beaded decoration. The gloves were well used and are gone, but the moccasins I still have in a shadow box in my studio.

    My brother and I went back to the area on a nostalgia trip and it was sad to see the house now. I realized some things are better to remember how they were and not how they are, because you can't go home and find that nothing has changed.

Here is the shadow box with the moccasins, a tomahawk (made in Japan) that I purchased at the Old Faithful Lodge in Yellowstone Park, an arrow head that my brother found, and a dream catcher made by the woman that put together the box for me.