Painting Memories

I’ve been doing these experiments with flowers while working on larger projects and commissions. 

It feels like they’re turning into a new series of sorts. A meditation on life and memory. 

I’ve been watching my dog get old while feeling my own age. 

My glasses don’t work so well anymore. I find myself having to take them off just to read now. 

My dog hobbling around the house makes the pain in my knees and hips feel more real. 

And every time my wife or son brings up something I can’t remember I feel like I’m slowly losing my connection to this place. 

I work so hard trying to build a life for us that its hard to slow down and appreciate what I have. 

So I take my dog on walks. Its good for her body. The stiffness in her joints gets worked out and by the end of our walks I recognize the dog she was when we got her all those years ago. 

Its nice to feel disconnected from the outside world while we walk and connected to the one I live in. 

Listening to the birds talk to one another. Watching the squirrels jump from tree to tree. Seeing the grass grow and the flowers bloom.

And then I think about where I lived before and how its barely a memory. 

I’m often arrested by the flowers in bloom. How beautiful they are and how temporary their beauty will be. 

A perfect photo one day will be less perfect the next. 

A week later the wilted leaves are falling and returning to the earth they came from to make way for next year’s blooms.

But I don’t have a visual memory. 

I struggle to visualize the lilly I photographed justa  few days ago.

So I’ve started to paint these flowers. 

But not as representations of what I’m photographing, more as fading memories, or as how I want to remember them. 

They say that our memories are actually less accurate the more we recall them. I’ve had this feeling where core memories often feel like fading photographs in an album and I wonder if the memory is real or if its a memory of someone else’s memory.

Did it really happen the way I want to believe? 

They say we tend to look at the past through rose tinted lenses and I love the idea that I can enhance my old memories in a way. 

I can paint the flowers how I want to remember them. 

I can make the scene brighter and more interesting, something we do as artists already. 

But in thinking about it like a memory there are fun ways to play with the space. To draw attention, the bring out the colors more or push them back. 

Was it a lone flower or a field? Was it grass green or starved for pigment?

I’m trying to paint the way that I visualize.

I think in systems. 

An apple in my mind is not a photograph of an apple, its a group of descriptions. A shape. A discussion of color. The greens and purples and how they enhance the red.

A stem, always slightly bent, idealized to a fault because thats the impression thats lasted. 

The bruises and holes never get recorded. Even though I’ve bit into a worm I can’t remember what it looked like and I don’t care to paint it. 

Those details are unnecessary for the system I use to build an apple in my mind. 

I’ve been looking at flowers in the same way. Breaking them down into color relationships. Shapes and lines. 

Trying to record a feeling more than an object because the feeling of the flower feels more important than a visual that my mind will never be able to hold. 

I secretly worry about getting dementia.

Then I tell myself that what I’m doing now will train my mind to remember feelings. 

That the world I will one day live in will be abstract and beautiful. 

Curated through these flower experiments.