Là-Bas

Là-Bas - Acrylic on canvas · Palette knife and brush · 30 × 40 in · Unframed · Original · Los Angeles, California

In Africa, when the kapok trees bloom, the air fills with it, soft white tufts drifting everywhere, unhurried, weightless, belonging to no particular direction. To a child, it is magic. To memory, it becomes something more.

Là-Bas — over there, far away — is painted entirely in red: the color of laterite earth, of heat, of a continent that stays with you. Against that field, a diagonal procession of kapok forms moves through the air as they did then, as they still do in memory. Painted with palette knife and brush, the red ground breathes and shifts; nothing here is flat or still. This is not a landscape. It is a sense memory, held in paint.

Acrylic on canvas. Palette knife and brush. Certificate of authenticity included. Ready to hang unframed.

Part of Le Monde Vu, within French-American painter Laurence Gamelin's Mémoire Vivante collection.