What the Ancestors Ask

The ancestors do not want worship. They want attention. They want to be consulted, to be included in the decisions, to be allowed to continue participating in the life of the living. This is not superstition — it is a way of understanding that the present is never self-made, that we are always standing on ground we did not lay.

When I use gold leaf in a painting about ancestry, I am not making a religious icon. I am acknowledging that the dead carry a light that does not extinguish — a light that, if we are attentive, we can still catch glimpses of. The gold is that glimpse, frozen on the surface.

To paint spiritually is to refuse the idea that matter is all there is. It is to insist, through the act of painting, that there are dimensions of experience that measurement cannot reach. The painting becomes a threshold — not between the living and the dead, but between the visible and the felt.