Notes From My Mother by James Edward Scherbarth

The handwriting is everywhere and you cannot read a word of it.

Notes From My Mother is a 2016 painting by James Edward Scherbarth (1949-2021), oil and cold wax on cradle board, signed and dated on the reverse. Abstract painters working in cold wax often scratch back through the layers, so that a surface can hold marks much as a page holds writing. The palette here stays in charcoal, slate and black. A single pale line runs across the upper left, and a dense thicket of white scribbles gathers at the center, thinning as it drifts downward. Thirty inches wide by 24 high.

Every family has an archive like this, in one form or another.