Grandma Annette ...
mid adventure, mid brave face, mid everything she never actually wanted to do. She hated skiing. Not mildly disliked. Hated it in the way one hates cold dishwater or surprise phone calls. And yet she went. Once. Because the man she loved adored the mountains, the speed, the thrill, the slightly reckless joy of hurtling downhill on two thin planks.
That is the quiet heroism at the center of this painting.
When I think about the architecture of love in my family, it rarely looks grand or cinematic. It looks like this. A woman in borrowed courage, smiling into wind she did not choose, standing upright in a landscape that belonged entirely to someone else’s dream. She became the steady ground beneath another person’s adventure and she did it with warmth, humor, and a kind of uncomplaining devotion that feels almost mythic in hindsight.
I placed her small in the snow on purpose. The landscape is vast, soft, and slightly blurred because memory always is. The mountains recede into quiet abstraction because the story is not about skiing. It is about presence. About the way love quietly rearranges itself around another person’s joy. About the bravery of showing up when the temperature drops and the path is unfamiliar.
This painting is not about adrenaline. It is about devotion. It is about the gentle courage of standing in the cold and saying yes to someone else’s happiness.
