Avo's Grapes

This piece is a memorial to something incredibly ordinary that became a moment to be longed for.

The grapes in this painting were grown in my grandfather’s backyard, where my siblings and I spent afternoons sitting outside eating them straight off the vine until we were completely full before dinner. We would pick them by the handful, feed them to the dogs, which I’ve since learned you are absolutely not supposed to do, but somehow those dogs lived to be about 18 years old, so clearly we were all just surviving on vibes and ignorance.

At the time, it never felt important. It just felt normal.

My grandfather playing football over his old staticky radio, relatives bickering in Portuguese, their senile dog barking at every fallen leaf; all things I didn't know I'd eventually miss so deeply.

My grandparents have since sold that house and moved back to Portugal, where they are now living their absolute best lives. But that backyard is gone now. The garden is gone with it. The vines that once wrapped around the trellis no longer exist.

And I think that’s the strange thing about nostalgia. It attaches itself to the smallest things. A grape. A smell. A warm afternoon. The sound of your grandparents talking in the background while the dogs run through the yard.

No matter how hard I try, I can’t recreate the feeling. I could buy the exact same type of grape today, and maybe it would taste sweet, maybe even better, but it would never taste like childhood. It would never carry that same warm, golden simplicity or the feeling of being small, safe, and completely unaware that moments like that could ever end.

This painting is my attempt to preserve a feeling that no longer physically exists, but still lives somewhere deep inside me.