While I worked as a giftware designer I rented a one bedroom house in Malagash, Nova Scotia. This house was said to have belonged to a lady named Odessa who had lived there all her life, raising five children by herself. My landlord, the owner of the house a the time, planned to redo the kitchen floor. It turned out to be an excavation project. He removed seven layers of linoleum, one for every decade of Odessa’s life! I was so amazed by this buried history and it’s fascinating texture and vintage patterns that I took a swatch from each layer upon which I painted vignettes from the life I reconstructed for her out of my imagination. All but the revolver, that was real. I discovered that in the eaves of the rickety shed that my landlord knocked down along with it a bank robbery note written in a scrawl with lots of spelling mistakes. Maybe it was a game one her kids had played with an old gun, all I know is that a lot of life had happened in that little place. The rubber ducky and the graphics of the wooden block refer to the innocence of youth in the '20s.