The act of what I call “keeping a wall” began in 1974. The bed in my room was underneath the finished stairs, so I had this private nook where I would sleep, read, and write. One day I made an unintentional mark on the wall with a pencil and no matter how hard I rubbed, it wouldn’t erase.
After many days, the allure of transforming the errant mark into something of beauty overwhelmed my fear of punishment. This time, the pencil on the wall was deliberate.
The mark bloomed into a flower; the stem sprouted some leaves, and by the time I stopped, an entire garden had sprung up along the length of the mattress, which was now officially a flower bed.
Every day I added more. Word art, scribbles, quotes. The way the graphite interacted with the chalkiness of the flat paint and the contrast of dark grey lead on a soft pastel yellow background became an obsession.
Eventually the work became too big to hide, and I confessed to a grandmother who already knew what I was doing and with her…
