12x12 Acrylic/ Glitter/ Canvas/ Resin. Ready to hang.
Our landlord is good natured and jolly. Loves to tell us the history of the house we live in. It’s been in his family for 70 years. There was a friend of his who brought her first baby home here. The tweakers that ripped out all of the copper. Patsy, the old woman with the immaculate garden. She left all of her Christmas decorations in the attic, and every year every flower you can imagine still blooms all over the property.
Our landlord lives in his other house across the street from ours. On Halloween this year, he had a giant bowl of every candy bar. “The big ones, it’s tradition.” He brings us avocados and lemons the size of footballs from his trees. We bring him pomegranates and I bake him pies, which I bring over in the fancy pie dish I brought just to bring to him, so it looks a little nicer. Like I know how to bake or something. I’ve fucked up a few pies. Like last Thanksgiving I accidentally put cornstarch and flour into the cherry filling. I made him one and us one, and it tasted like chapstick. He never mentioned it, only returned the pie dish to us a few weeks later, full of cookies from a bakery. We don’t know where we would be without him. We moved here in 2018, long before it was $4,500 to rent a 2 bedroom house by the ocean. He’s been kind to us, but never intrusive.
My favorite is getting a text from him that reads “I'll stop by in 10 minutes.” He always has a pink box of opulent desserts and pastries from a Jewish bakery. Sometimes, when the world is the most dark, I close my eyes and imagine my landlord at my door - eyes sparkling, carefully holding a heavy pink box of treats with both hands. This simple act of kindness - done for no reason other than to be kind and do something nice for someone else - gives me faith that beyond the headlines and media screaming at us about separation and chaos day in and day out - in the real world, beyond the screens - people are still good. And thoughtful, and considerate. This painting is a portrait of that faith.
