Archaeology: The Future Looms– At Principle Gallery
Time’s arrow, we are told, is a one-way thing… Memory’s arrow, like the needle of a compass too close to a lodestone, spins in all directions.
–Russell Hoban, Amaryllis Night and Day (2001)
It’s President’s Day so there’s not much to say this morning, what with the idea of having a unifying presence in the White House being just a quaint notion now. A memory of bygone days.
Speaking of memory, I came across the passage above from the late novelist and American expat Russell Hoban and it reminded me of how memory has a strange way of laying with me when I work. I can’t tell you the thousands of hours I have spent working on paintings where my mind is recalling people and moments from my past that had seemingly little or no significance to me.
I will be focusing on a section of color and all that runs through my head is the vague remembrance some kid who I didn’t really know — or even want to know for that matter– who was just a passing acquaintance in high school. Or a single word or look from a stranger fifty years removed. It’s maddening as the harder I try to shake it out of my mind’s limited space, the more it expands to fill the space. It goes on for hours as I work and leaves me exasperated, wondering why it’s even there to begin with.
But it is. And there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do to counter it. My memory’s arrow just spins out of control, unable to locate its lodestone, its true North. I would like to think that it serves some purpose, that it is some function that needs to occur. Maybe it is my mind calling for emptiness so that it can focus and this little nothing of a memory refuses to budge.
I don’t know.
I would like to say that this occurs on those days when my work doesn’t come easily but, in reality, it comes on bad and good days, often occurring on days when things are going great with the work and I am in a deep groove.
For god’s sake, it’s happening right now. Aargh…
Okay, here’s a song that will hopefully clear out those strangers lurking in my memory. I thought I was going to share an acoustic guitar version of Time from Pink Floyd. But an acoustic version of their Us and Them from Guido Mancino came up right after Time finished playing. Goven what we’re going through right now, it seemed the better selection, even if it doesn’t completely fall in line with this post.
Redtree Times 