You Used to Hold Me: What the Hands Remember

This one came from a song before it came from a painting.

"You Used to Hold Me," by Ralph Rosario featuring Xaviera Gold, is a Chicago house record I've come back to more times than I can count, the kind of song that sounds like joy on the surface and something a lot more complicated underneath, if you actually sit with the lyrics. I wanted to paint that feeling: the version of longing that still moves like a dance track.

The palm tree is Southern California, obviously, it's where I make almost everything, and it's the backdrop to most of my own version of that feeling. But I surrounded it with hands, reaching, floating, disconnected from any body, because that's what the title is really about. Not the person. The hold. The specific, physical memory of being held by someone who isn't holding you anymore.

I let the type take over the piece on purpose. YOU USED TO HOLD ME in letters big enough to block half the tree, because that's how memory actually works. It doesn't sit quietly in the background. It takes up the whole view until you can barely see anything else.

It's one of the more personal pieces I've made, and probably the one that surprises people most when they find out the story behind it, since at a glance it reads as pure summer and blue sky. Most good sad songs do the same thing. They dress the ache up in something that sounds like a good time.

You Used to Hold Me is available now as a print or as a framed canvas wrap, for anyone who's ever danced to a song about someone they were trying to get over.