The Mystery of Memory

Date

2020-02-28

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Abstract

My body of work comments on the fluidity of memories, and uses water as a metaphor to depict time’s distortion of memories. As we age, we begin to lose the ability to recall certain memories- memories that at one time were very important to us. Memories can also sift and change over time, making it hard to find the “truth” in what we remember. My paintings and drawings are a balance between representation and abstraction, reflecting both on things that actually happened in my own past, and on the difficulty I have in remembering these things exactly, given the mental struggles I have undergone the past two and a half years.. Drawing on the works of such artists as Bill Jacobson, Vija Celmins, and Marilyn Minter, I have found successful ways to combine these different approaches into harmonious compositions, through layering, the delineation of details, and the addition of enhanced levels of saturation. These techniques have resulted in bright, mysterious, and even surrealistic paintings. Surrealism means “beyond reality” and my paintings are just this: both real and more than simply “real.” My subject matter is based on photographs as a means to capture and represent past memories, but of course an imperfect one. Each source photo consists of family members or friends because it is the people, not the place, that are most important to me. I then use water to distort the photos to suggest how memories would look if we could see into our brains- faces become distorted, individuals appear and disappear, and colors become
more and less vivid as the memory is accessed then forgotten, or they even lose their intensity altogether, depicting the drastic effects time has on our memories.

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Keywords

Painting, Drawing, Memory Distortion

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