Memories and Dreams

Memories and Dreams

We’ve all heard it mentioned that great minds - Einstein with his theory of relativity and Mendeleev with his periodic table, to name just two - came to their ideas and understandings through dreams.  Most of us have experienced something lost to our conscious minds that is solved, or comes back to us in dreams.  Sometimes it is as simple as a word that we couldn’t call forth in a sentence, or something misplaced that we recall during our dreaming state. More recently, we’ve come to an accepted practice of using visualization - a sort of self-induced dream state - to enhance our performance, be it a speech we have to give, an athletic performance, or even the rehearsal of an anticipated difficult personal interaction. 

In my painting, I’ve come to view memory in this same way.  We don’t remember our most precious moments in crystal clear photo realism.  These moments appear somehow foggy around the edges, and yet imbued with their own type of clarity. The images in our mind are not limited to the visual, but are heightened by smells or the sound of the music that was playing, or the physical sensations of the breeze, or the brush of the fabric of our clothing against our skin.

When I work to capture a memory, as so many of my paintings do, I wrestle with this paradox.  How do I make it real, evoke the emotion of the moment, while surrendering to the unreal qualities that accompany our memories of such moments? How do I leave details unclear, evoke sensations other than the visual? It seems to diminish the event if I confine it to what is in the imagery I use for reference.

I think sometimes I must learn to paint less.  Leave more to the imagination of the viewer.  Sometimes I must be willing to include elements that are not only inaccurate, but impossible.  One of my recent pieces, As Above, So Below drew imagery from Hubble telescope photos of space for the background. I had been struggling with this piece, but this felt just right. The sweet boy in this painting reaches out and extends his hand to his teenage cousin. The stars float around the two of them, suspending reality and enveloping them in timelessness. The boy in this painting did not live to his own teenage years, but the celestial setting brings a sense of his far-reaching touch, and the timeless quality of the life he lived.