Redtree Times

Galvanic Memory– 2002

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

–Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

The painting, Galvanic Memory, shown above has long been a favorite of mine. It was painted in 2002 and is among the paintings I call my Dark Work. That phrase has two meanings. The simplest was that it was among my first forays into painting on a black surface, which naturally gave the painting a darker tone. My typical work of the time was brighter, in transparent inks over a white background, which made the darkness of this work seem even more evident. 

The second meaning is the one that I normally use. It all emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 in 2001, a reaction to the seismic shift in this country and in the world brought on by the attacks and our reaction. The work’s darkness reflected both the tone of that time and my own.

This particular painting always spoke to me in a most personal way. I know that sounds funny since my work, and most art for that matter, is all personal by its very nature. But this one felt narrower in scope, like the message it was communicating was meant for me alone.

I don’t know that this is true. It just felt that way at the time. 

It even felt a little different in its appearance. The colors, bright but somewhat muted, and forms, a mix of angles and arcs, gave it what I took as an abstract quality.

There was no full representation of any of its elements. Everything appeared in fragments. You never see the whole tree or the whole chair. Even the window and door are not seen in their entirety.

I saw this as being much like some of my memories. They have a vivid, electric quality in my remembrance, which is where the galvanic part of the title comes in. But even though they are filled with vivid energy, the memories only come to me in fragments. I only experience it in bits and pieces. A remembered glimpse out a window. The way the light broke on the horizon. The chair in the room or the way the tree outside the window stretched across my vision at the time.

I think of the memory of any time as being whole but in fact they are more often mere fragments that we reassemble. It reminds me of a line from a 1992 interview with the late poet Derek Walcott that appeared in The Guardian:

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

Sometimes our memory of any given moment takes on greater significance in our minds over time, more than we recognized when it took place. We didn’t take in all the details originally and because the memory has taken on greater importance as we try to fill out those details.

But it is all bits and pieces. Fragments.

I know it’s that way with memories of my parents, especially my mom who died back in 1995. I have vivid memories of moments with her but time and my inattention at the time have robbed me of the whole of that moment.

Moments I took for granted then. Moments seen only in fragments now.

Fragments reassembled with love but fragments, nonetheless. 

I debated about making this piece part of my upcoming June show, Flow, at the Principle Gallery. I wasn’t sure I could give up this painting, representing as it does those shards of my memory. In the end, I decided to let it go. It came down to the fact that it would please me more if someone else were able to find something in it that sparked a response to their own distant broken memories. If it was the beginning of their own loving reassemblage of a past moment, so much the better.

It has already helped me in that way. It deserves to move out into the world again. After all, I forever have the memory of this painting now, even if it comes sometimes in bits and pieces. And if I can’t remember, I have the image to remind me.

Here’s a song that always makes me stop and listen when it comes on. This is Windows Are Rolled Down from Amos Lee. Though the song’s intended meaning is probably not the same as my own take on it, I chose it because there is imagery in it that instantly pulls out distant fragments of memory for me. A childhood summer day riding in the front seat with my dad with the windows rolled down. I don’t know where we’re headed, but I can see the gleam of the chrome of the small triangular wing window that old cars once had. I can feel the wind on my arm as I put my hand out to catch it and feel tis resistance. We’re not talking but at any moment he might break out in some nonsense song, maybe one he made up, that I still know and can hear like it was written in my bones. 

Fragments all, reassembled with love…