Tekiah Magazine

This piece wasn’t really designed. It was gathered. Every torn photograph, every scrap of text, every mark on the page was chosen because it meant something: not because it looked good in a composition, but because when you choose pieces with someone in mind, it comes together much more organically than when you try to make a collage. It inspires a feeling worth keeping and emanates that person. This piece was made for my friend Peyton. 

The background came first. Blue ink and pigment sprayed and splattered across the surface, falling the way the wind intended. It wasn’t meant to be controlled. But when everything else was layered on top, the piece starts to come together. Things landed where they needed to. That shift, from disorder to something legible, is the way the piece is crafted to mean something, not just to be a mindless background item. 

The burgundy in the lower left is the heaviest color in the work. Red carries a lot: vitality, sacrifice, the body, loss, renewal. It keeps the piece from feeling too light or too sentimental. It grounds the piece.

 The photographs aren’t decoration. They’re the point. Each one is specific and deliberate, pulled from a real archive of my memory of Peyton. There’s a concept in Jewish tradition called chesed, which means loving kindness, that shows up in the way you pay attention to someone. Gathering the details of a person or a moment and holding onto them carefully is its own form of care. That’s what this piece means.

The Hebrew text is about love and faith. You practice that. You show up for them even when you’re working with nothing but fragments and a loose sense that they’ll add up to something. That’s also just what creating a piece is.

Memory in Jewish thought isn’t about looking back. Zachor, remember, is a commandment, not a suggestion. It’s about staying connected to what matters. This piece does that in the most literal way possible: it takes something invisible and makes it physical. Something you can look at and stand in front of and actually feel.