SCOTT STANLEY
A Place Called Home
“You never know what someone is really like until you’ve seen where and how they live.” I remember hearing this little bit from a friend when I was growing up. It’s a good philosophy to think about before casting judgment or stereotyping someone. Home is such a unique personal experience for every living being. No matter who you are or where you are at, you’ll always have that unbreakable bond of where you came from.
Home, it’s that word people hang on the front door; it denotes warmth and protection, an alternative or addition to the word welcome. Every person has a home somewhere. It might not specifically be made of brick and mortar with a white picket fence and a dog, but we all have an unchangeable collection of stories, personal memories, things we’ve loved, our greatest accomplishments, our defeats, and those people who enter and exit throughout all of life’s avenues. Home becomes this ever-growing masonry work that’s bricked together with our collection of adventures from the day we were created and continues on and is passed on to our children just as we received it from those who raised us.
People are peculiar no matter who you are. We are each figures placed in a world where we belong. Home life is the center stage and it is the nouns and adjectives that describe us. We bring up who we are and where we came from in every day conversation, arguing our personal ideals as reference to the individual happenings of our lives. It is all based on you and what you’ve experienced and no one can take that away. You are one of a kind.
My wife’s home is an ocean away from the place that I call home. Visiting there is the grandest experience because all the samplings of her home life become wide open and more visual. I can see why she enjoys the raw squid when I enjoy a frozen Tony’s pizza. She is empowered by familiar locations, peoples and activities that make her comfortable and free. She is home when she is in that familiar place, but we are also very much at home when she is that same ocean away sharing the gallant, tender, frail experiences of her home with me in our rinky-dink condominium.
Each being has a home. No matter who or what you are or where you come from or even where you go, as a member of the family of planet earth, you have a home, a sanctuary of the self, and you always bring it along.
These photos of the exhibit “A Place Called Home” are courtesty of Gavin’s Underground, Salt Lake City Weekly. This show was up on display at Art Access Gallery, Salt Lake City from January 1st to February 11th 2011.
These drawings are all samples of concepts that helped develop and reference the place called home series. These original drawings led to the end product of 15 final drawing.
Hakodate, Japan. I would just sit down in the street for a quick sketch, and that is how it all began.
