In Rhapsody– Available through West End Gallery
But I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland.
— Anselm Kiefer
I don’t usually like to share quotes from other artists without also highlighting their work. However, since I have shared this quote from artist Anselm Kiefer as well as other posts featuring his work, I thought I would just focus on this quote and its meaning for me. It might best describe how I feel about what I do.
I do view my work in many ways as the palace of my memory, a visual storehouse of my recollections of life’s sensations. It is a place where I can compile and tell the stories of my memory, sometimes embellishing and maybe even aggrandizing them. A palace need not be plain and dull as our reality sometimes is.
And much as Kiefer wrote, my memory in the form of my work is my only homeland. It is the only place where I feel totally at home. It is a land that is responsive to my needs as well as being loyal and true to me. And me to it.
I think it was this sense of being and acceptance that I found in my work that first attracted me to art. It wasn’t a desire to make pretty things or emulate others because I possessed that talent. I didn’t. There is another quote from Kiefer that I have shared before that sums up pretty well my own attraction to painting:
As an artist you have to find something that deeply interests you. It’s not enough to make art that is about art, to look at Matisse and Picasso and say, how can I paint like them? You have to be obsessed by something that can’t come out in any other way, then the other things – the skill and technique – will follow.
I desperately needed an outlet to release the landscape of my memories, to create a place where I could erect my own palace. Painting provided that in ways I couldn’t find in other ways of expression. And, as Kiefer says, the skill and technique followed. Well, I like to think that it did.
I don’t know why I am writing this this morning. I think some of it has to do with the amount of time I have spent in looking at older work while prepping for my current solo show at the Principle Gallery and my October show at the West End Gallery. Revisiting that older work is like looking at images of my palace being constructed. You might say the first building blocks being put in place. At the time, I didn’t know that but now that the structure is pretty much in place, I can see their importance in the construction that came after them. Each was a vital building block.
Without them, the palace would not have come to fruition. And though it might appear humble when compared to the palaces of others, I find that don’t really care. It is my palace and like the work it reflects, it is not meant to be like any other palace.
And that is that.
I struggled to find a song but settled on this one, Will You Miss Me When I Burn, from singer/songwriter Will Oldham who has recorded this under the psudonym Bonnie “Prince” Billy as well as Palace and Palace Brothers. I went for the Palace connection. Oldham wrote and recorded one of my favorite songs, I See a Darkness, that Johnny Cash covered in his last true incarnation as the artist he was. The darkness of that song is also present in this one selected for today, but it seems to match up with the painting.
That is to say that it fits well my palace.
Now be gone with you or the Palace Guard shall be summoned…
I like Kiefer’s idea of the palace of memory as memory being his only homeland because it somewhat resonates with me. Not about art but because I’ve lived away from family for many years and have often relied on the fondness of memories.
“As an artist you have to find something that deeply interests you.” Exactly.
Years ago, I remember either writing in a post, or saying in an exchange with a reader, that I wasn’t about to write about (whatever it was that had been suggested as a topic for me). As I said, “That seems boring, and if a topic bores me, whatever I write surely will bore my readers.”