AUGUST AUGUST

Acrylic on canvas, 1 x 3 FT.

August means inspiring reverence or admiration. And, of course, it’s the name of the 8th month of the year.

This is the second piece I’ve made with the august August in mind. Both pieces were shaped in commemoration but for very different reasons. The first painting was made in celebration of my return home to Colorado on August 8th, 2019, after an unexpected one-way ticket to my hometown December 17th of 2016. It was a happy painting, a bright painting, a painting encapsulating joy and gratitude. I had worked hard to get into that space, arriving at it in August gave that painting its name.

The road to August was long. It had highlights and lowlights. It had regrets that needed time to mend and precious moments punctuated with laughter. It involved rejoining a life I’d left long ago and a return. They say you can’t go home again; I found so many shades of that adage to be true. At the same time, I discovered “home” had changed for me as much as I had changed for it. What had been the childhood home I returned to in Dallas was actually over 700 miles and a time zone away from the hometown I’d grown to identify with as an adult. I felt far more distant from where I was than from where I’d come. Even now, that time is a blur. What isn’t a blur is that I got by with a little help from my friends, though long-distance in those years. Life is a circus. Under the big top, we take turns being the entertainers and the audience. But, no matter where we are adjacent to the three rings, we don’t experience it alone. It’s the friendships we make along the way that give it meaning.

This piece is called AUGUST AUGUST because the first painting belonged to Sergei, who shed this mortal coil in October of 2024. He was not only a favorite clown but a best friend and one of the reasons that August homecoming was so sweet, needing celebration. An old housemate, he’d check in on me while I was in Dallas and made sure I wasn’t alone on those first holidays after I returned. Our lifestyles may have populated different rings as the years stretched, yet there was never a question that we would always be under the same big top. The first piece that still hangs on his widow’s wall was about celebration and the month, August. This piece is about a celebration of life and the word, because Sergei and his ability to be a friend… well, his memory remains everything that is AUGUST.