GOLDEN YEARS 

Essay by Cintra Wilson

The particular sunlight of Florida, as seen in Abbey Golden’s paintings, creates lacy textural webs over shuffleboard courts, golf courses, and community pools. Its intensity bleaches bright resort colors almost unto pastels. Networks of tree-shadows and pool-ripples make an almost cellular transition, across well-trimmed lawns, into tropical upholstery patterns, Hawaiian shirts and tablecloths. 

In Abbey Golden’s paintings, Florida itself is a kind of Shangri-La; it represents the comfort and well-being of her older retired parents in what Golden has called the “idyllic” world of the Florida retirement community where the senior Goldens are living out their “Golden Years.”

There is a palpable immediacy to Golden’s subjects’ desires to live life to the fullest in this senior utopia, where the residents, in lavishly narrative sunlit scenes, enjoy a low-speed variety of country-club-style, hot weather activities. Stocky, slow-moving figures of the older generation in comically loud sporting attire lumber along moodily reflective shorelines and stiffly lob pickleballs to their cohorts.  Rings and bracelets decorate loose-skinned, purple-tanned arms over a game of Mah Jongg. In “Yentas by the Pool,”  lumpy, tanned women past a certain age engage in a timeless scene of communal gossip sharing.  

While the painterly largesse of the scenes —wrought in saturated, meaty pinks, fairway greens and hot sky tones, evocative of David Hockney’s swimming pools of the 1970’s — suggests all the ripeness, fecundity and robust chillaxing Florida has to offer, what is also discernible in Golden’s signature motif of somewhat hallucinatory shadow patterns is an over-arching concern for her parents in their advancing frailty.  Each work speaks to a daughter’s yearning through oil paint to keep her parents frozen in time, in the sanctuary which is the chosen reward for their lives of work, in the bright, resort atmosphere where their commitments are limited to enjoyment. 

Golden’s works address this dichotomy.  Uncertainty and confusion exist in the same space as her parents’ safe, open-ended vacation of rounded corners and shuffleboard.  The artist’s bemused fondness and love for her subjects reveal themselves in the same rayon palm-prints as doubt, bewilderment and mortality.

Golden’s work urges the viewer toward a deeper appreciation of the moments in time that each of our loved ones have left, and an embracing, with a kind of daffy humor, of all of the awkward shape-shifting, vertigo, fear and confusion that comes with advanced age.  The works are both an exhortation (to quote Monty Python) to “always look on the bright side of life,” no matter how near its end we may be, and also a challenge to relate more intimately to our elderly — to witness them where they are, gently, patiently, and with a warmth and consistency equalling that of bright Florida, where eventually the fortunate among us may be put out to pasture, in a room near the pool.