Exhibition - Mother Lasting: Irene Delka Mccray

McCray paints her mother on large canvases, the images much larger than life, to acknowledge her enormous impact, as well as to focus on the beautiful and complex profundities of wizened old flesh. The exhibition is meant to remind and connect members of the community in mutual familiarity to their own experiences with elderly loved ones.

“These paintings and drawings reflect on my mother in her final months with Alzheimer’s,” states McCray. “The work honors her imaginal journeying that lengthens my life backwards in favor of her long ago, and respects the reversal of trust, from me in her to her in me. Even with a lifetime of experience with the strength of my mother’s character, it’s her end years that impress me the most.”

“I am also meaning this work to encourage visibility of our elders and oppose a general cultural attitude of dismissal of the old, which, among many other injustices, was brought to light during the covid pandemic. The slow and indifferent response to our old ones being very vulnerable in care homes prompts me to paint and draw my mom from memory, imagination, and photos taken of her through windows during the lockdown. To think that elders are insignificant in this world consumed with productivity and usefulness is unjust and offensive, as longevity is its own state of being, holding meaning and discovery in layers of lasting. As the old pull themselves in, they expand us out to connections with lost threads of a cultural past, presenting for us what and who we arrive out of.

The beautiful and complex profundities of wizened old flesh seem to me to take on a likeness to leaf veins, so I make those pairings in some of the work, which returns her in my mind to the expansive mystery of nature and the all.”

James Hillman in The Force of Character and the Lasting Life:
Can we imagine that at the essence of human being is an insistence upon being witnessed – by others, by gods, by the cosmos itself – and that the inner force of character cannot be concealed from this display. The image will out, and the last years put the final finish to the image. (pg 201)

A Companion Writers Workshop, Memoir of a Moment, will be taught by Tree Bernstein on Friday, May 17th at 7pm. For the two-hour workshop at the Firehouse Art Gallery, participants will read and discuss prose and poetry examples of memoirs from handouts looking closely at form and technique and its emotional affect. After this, participants will get a chance to write their memoir moments and share examples with the group.

Irene Delka McCray is an artist and educator. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited mostly in Colorado, where she now lives, and also in New Mexico, California, Missouri, Washington DC, and Arizona. She is a retired professor from Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Lakewood, CO and was represented by Sandra Phillips Gallery in Denver.