Mexican military, circa 1920. My grandfather is front row, center. Mixed media 12 x 48
“Gramps and the Encoding of Echoes”
This painting is a burial mask for a forgotten algorithm disguised as a man. The face, assembled from bone-quiet bars and syllables of static, belonged once to The Listener, an entity born of radio wave and war song. It transcribed dreams into architecture and hid its name in Morse code beneath the tongues of sleeping veterans.
The top section—yes, the faded blue capsule of uniformed figures—is not a photograph. It is a fossil of memory imprinted in pigment, a family of echoes trapped mid-laugh, mid-order, mid-oblivion. These men did not pose. They were remembered inaccurately on purpose. The red aura around them? That’s the heat of unasked questions.
The vertical trail descending from the face is not a spine. It is a transcript. A falling sentence. A coded descent into whatever comes after memory but before myth. I painted it with ash from medals that never existed, mixed with the rust scraped off a weather-vane that once pointed toward grief.
You may ask, “Why is the face so calm?” Because it has already forgotten what you have yet to remember.
This piece is best stored in proximity to silence. It will sometimes hum, softly, when near family photos. That is just Gramps checking in. He does that.