Every man’s memory is his private literature.
-Aldous Huxley
***********
As I have stated in the past here, the Red Chair, an icon that often appears in my work, is a symbol to me of people and places and experiences from the past. In short, my memory. In this new piece, Memory Way, that is most certainly the case. This little painting, 2″ by 5″ on paper, is another of my pieces from the Little Gems exhibit which opens Friday at the West End Gallery.
The road here represents to me the continuum of time. The landscape is almost idyllic, perhaps representing my tendency to block out the worst parts of memory. At least, to downplay them and keep them in the background and to put what good there was there in the best possible light. I like to revisit the past occasionally and I have to make it a place where I am comfortable. A past filled with nothing but dark and fear-filled memories is no place to venture on a regular basis.
Anyway, this little piece makes me happy and fills my mind with a feeling of good memories. As Huxley said above, our memory is our own private literature, filled with the memories of our lives and the lives of our ancestors. I sometimes edit, embellish and redact my life’s literature, all to make it an interesting read for myself.
That’s what I see in this little guy.
Redtree Times 
All around the south (and perhaps in other places, too) you’ll often see a single chair out under a tree. My grandmother’s neighbor, Jenny, kept a chair under her catalpa tree from snow melt to the next first snow. She called it her “settin’ chair”, and she surely did “set”. It’s a wonderful, nostalgic image, but I suspect even for those without such memories it has a bit of a primal pull.
I’ve always felt that the chair has some sort of ingrained connection with us, something that is triggered by the form.
Rocking chairs on the front porch, here. I like the red tree and the red chair together. Learn what you can from the bad, hard memories, then let them go. There’s no point carrying all those heavy dark memories around. As I tell my best friend, who has a tendency to schlep around way too much baggage, and beat herself up with all the shoulda’s and oughta’s, put the ball bat down and walk away. Go sit for a spell in the red chair in the shade of the red tree.
Sitting on a red chair in the shade of the red tree– sounds pretty good right now.