That Childhood Continent Beyond Illumination are pieces from a larger suite of automatic drawing/poem paintings, intentionally completed in an afternoon.
These depict an ongoing game of Hearts my older brother and I played one summer when I was in high school.
We made up our own absurd rules for how we played the game.
He’d never let me win at any of the games and the truth is, I probably wouldn’t have won that summer either.
But one night he came home high and then kept drinking beer after beer.
We played Hearts for hours, laughing, shuffling the cards, dealing.
While we were playing, he was dying. Of course, I didn’t know it then.
This late summer game of Hearts became a stand-in for all the things we felt but couldn’t say to each other because he moved out of the house soon after and we never spent that much time together tethered as brother and sister.
I was blind to his descent.
He died a handful of summers later—alone on a Chicago street.
One afternoon, by chance, I felt compelled to make these and afterwards, I felt like some of the leftover wildcards in our lives made a little more sense.
Arlene Tribbia is a writer and artist who grew up in Chicago. Stories of hers have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published widely as well as internationally. Her drawings, paintings, painted poems and novel book sculptures have been exhibited in many places from dance halls to skyscrapers as well as art galleries.
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