[On Painting] On Painting and Memory

[Duane]

When we revisit a painting in a museum or gallery, it always seems to be a little different than when we last saw it. It changes a little each time. It seems smaller, or we notice some new detail or we find we don’t connect with it in the same way, but invariably it is different. This is because a painting spends most of its time in our memory. Bits and pieces of it hover in our mind long after we leave the museum. We may visit a painting for only a few moments, but a painting that moves us, stays with us. Moments in our life remind us of it, or we may find ourselves suddenly seeing things through the eyes of the painter. We think, “This is something he would have painted.” I see Hopper paintings every time I catch a glimpse of someone in a window at night; I see a Vermeer when I see light on a wall.

I am always surprised when I revisit Hopper paintings. In my memory they are teeming with detail but in real life they are devoid of it. It is a little like the writing of Hemingway who uses a just a few words to crystallize a million details that already existed in our mind. One example of a phantom detail: in all the urban scenes Hopper painted, he did not paint a single brick. He only painted the things that needed to be there to invoke the essence of a place, a loneliness or isolation. A super-saturated solution of salt is liquid, but if you drop a thread into it and agitate the surface a little, it crystallizes into a solid form. I think painting can be the same way: a good painting can crystallize many disparate memories or emotions in us. The painter gives us the thread.




Our memory of a work in progress can be quite fluid as well. Technically, all painting is from memory. Most of the marks we make are made while looking away from our subject. We look up frequently to refresh our fleeting visual memories, but then look away to place the brush (though an experienced painter may make many marks while looking at his subject.) It is said that Titian would make an underpainting (using red ochre as a ground and scumbling lead white to model the forms) and then turn it so it was facing the wall and then not look at it for six months. When, after the six months, he turned it back around to view them, he said it had turned into a “monster,” full of ugly deformities. That six-month separation gave him fresh eyes-- an unbiased view of his work.

. We tend to nurture and protect every brushstroke we make, even if we sense a “monster” is in the making. We fall in love with our work too easily. All painters have little tricks to try to deal with this: while evaluating a painting an artist will tilt his head, squint his eyes, look at the painting upside down, under different light or in a mirror etc. He is trying to sneak up on it and catch it in an unguarded moment. And then it comes down to courage; it is one thing to discover weak painting, but it is quite another to change it. It takes courage to decide that a section of a painting that you worked on for a month is a failure and must we painted out. Titian recognized this fact and decided to use time to numb his memory of the time and effor he had put into it. He cut the umbilical cord so he could see the painting as something separate from himself.

Which reminds me of a couple mildly amusing, though slightly tangential, stories: one Summer I was working on a self-portrait in my apartment in Brooklyn. I had a mirror set-up and a small lamp to light my face and my easel. After working on it for two months or so my roommate walked in and asked me what was wrong with my face. I looked in the mirror and noticed to my surprise that I was inadvertently drooping my lip. I then realized that I was subconsciously trying to make my lip look like the lip in my painting! The lip in the painting was beautifully painted and was the result of many long hours of frustrating trial and error. Unfortunately it wasn’t my lip. So instead of changing my painting to look like me, I tried to morph my face to look like the painting.

I know a painter who worked on a portrait in two-hour increments for a total of 90 hours, with his subject present. One day his model, who had commissioned the work and who had grown familiar with the various painting sounds this artist made while working, heard a very different sound … the sound of scraping and sanding. To his dismay, the artist was starting over and didn’t think twice about it. Sometimes you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Of course, a painting is always changing physically as well. The painting that leaves our easel today may look very different a hundred years from now. Oil paint gets brittle and, like human skin, gets thin and translucent with age. It expands and contracts (in essence it breathes) along with the support it was painted on, and so it cracks; colors can fade, linseed oil yellows. Surprisingly, it is pastel drawings that age the best (if they are protected properly) because they have no appreciable “skin”-- medium or oil that can yellow or crack or wrinkle. It is just pigment and paper.

So a painting is not a static image, a snapshot frozen and hanging on a gallery wall. A painting ages with us. Our memory of it evolves and shifts; thus in our minds we are constantly changing it and it is changing us. A painting is a living, breathing thing.

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Posted By Duane to On Painting at 12/08/2006 07:30:00 AM