Living at the Eddy

Story Summary

Living at the Eddy grew out of a grand opening celebration at my new apartment community in Bend. Neighbors contributed words and drawings about what “Living at the Eddy” meant to them, forming a rich Subliminal layer. Over a year later, I returned to the canvas with deeper understanding, pouring paint, adding texture, and honoring a hand-drawn tree and the building’s colorful wallpaper palette. The finished work celebrates river-life, community, and the many unseen stories embedded beneath its surface.

Story

After a year of travel doing #vanlife, I shifted to a more permanent location and moved into the Eddy apartments, in Bend. Bend was a place I called home. After months of new neighbors moving in and everyone getting settled into our new surroundings, with the river right outside our door, coffee shops, and the Deschutes River Trail within walking distance, a grand opening celebration invited all the new residents to meet each other. There were raffle prizes, music, and food trucks in the parking lot. As I love creating community-inspired art, I thought it great to have all my new neighbors share the inspiration of what “Living at the Eddy” meant to them. After clearing it with management, I set up and prepared the canvas for residents to add their contributions. As I met neighbors and spoke about the type of art I create, I shared the prompt and they were excited to add words or draw items of what “Living at the Eddy” meant to them. I experimented with a new style crayon like marker and after realizing it smeared easily when first applied, I gave the guidance of making sure they gave distance from others contributions. After, like always, I offered a sticker “I Contribute to Art” as a thank you. After the food trucks were depleted of their delicious food, and drinks were consumed we wrapped up the evening and upon glancing at all the contributions, I felt like the canvas was complete of the myriad of options that abound close to and around Bend. I placed the canvas on hold for over a year as I was truly understanding what it meant to live at the Eddy along with working on a number of other contribution canvases at other events I was participating in throughout the year. One evening in September 20th, I decided to read through the contributions and after I added what it meant to me, I began painting. Trees of all sorts abound in the high desert of the Pacific Northwest, and evergreens are seen in town and extremely prevalent minutes outside. As I began pouring the paint on like I normally do, I enjoy using texture tools to bring out different dimensions to the painting and as someone drew a tree and wanted to capture the tree (abstractly) and also see if the original tree could shine through. You can make remnants of that tree at the bottom left. As I am “in the flow” of painting, the words contributed by the community inspire paint selection along with more intuition and as I completed the textured work my girlfriend pointed out the painting's color palette was very close to the wallpaper installed outside of the elevator on floors 1: green, floor 2: red, and floor 3 is blue. As in each work, some words are completely hidden, while others are still seen. Each contribution is embedded underneath, whether seen or unseen…that is the reason I snap a picture of the subliminal layer and include a copy of the word list to ensure even if it gets covered up, you can still read your word or see that your visual was captured. Thank you to all my neighbors who contributed in this creation and I present “Living at the Eddy.”