B-Sides: SHAHEEN Modern and contemporary art, Cleveland, OH
B-side
The Woodpile, 2026
Powdered graphite on paper
14 x 20 inches
You’re standing with your grandfather, posing for a picture in his driveway in front of the woodpile. The two of you were splitting and piling wood for the fireplace. You don’t know who took the picture. Because of the coat and hat you’re wearing and the fallen leaves on the asphalt you know that it’s autumn. The sun is shining, the pine branches hang over the chaotically criss-crossing logs, the air smells like pine and freshly split wood, the broom you used to sweep up the leaves and sawdust is leaning against the side of the garage. Before it snowed the piled wood went as high as the garage roof. You remember the weight of the wood, the heavy tools you used to split the wood, you remember throwing logs into the wheelbarrow and pushing the wheelbarrow up the short hill to the house, stacking the logs on the front porch, and how the larger logs were set aside as night pieces wood he would throughout the night. There’s something about the weight of all the wood and the labor surrounding it and the man who was your grandfather that melds together in your mind. As a boy you never thought that, but you knew it, you knew your grandfather was always lifting and carrying and moving something, splitting and piling, and dragging and pulling at things, as a boy you knew the heaviness of the man, felt the weight of him in your life and in your mother’s life too, and you feared him, although sometimes this heaviness of his wasn’t there so much, where it went you didn’t know and when it wasn’t there he would smile and laugh and put his arm over your shoulder like a normal grandfather, but the heaviness always came back, and with it the anger, the reddening face and the yellowing eyes. Now when you think of the pain he caused you and your mother you think of it as a pain that belonged to him, it even looked like that then, outwardly, like something he had been lost inside of for most of his life.