You Never Leave My Thoughts (Memorial Day Painting)
6.5″x17.5″ mixed media painting on stone paper. There is a .25″ border.
This painting is available HERE
If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden. ~Claudia Ghandi
Drifting In And Out
I finished this painting today.
The title refers to the way our memories fade in and out. Some memories are so clear while others are foggy and transparent. The memories that are clear are not always the most important, often we wonder why we have held on to that memory at all. How can we remember things so vividly from long ago but barely remember things that happened to us last week?
The memory can be selective and often distorted. What is really true, what is fabricated, what is embellished? I often wonder these things. And I often worry what memories I am creating for my children. What are they going to remember? Mommy keeping the house clean? Our walks to the library? Ballet class? Our endless photo sessions? Watching too many Barbie movies? My limited patience? My reclusive tendencies? How will my choices effect them in their adult lives? Did I give them a feeling of entitlement?* And on and on. It sure can be exhausting.
I remember somewhere I heard/read of a woman ( I think it was some film star) saying she had absolutely no memory of her childhood. It was like she didn’t exist before a certain time. I wish I could remember if I had read it or heard it on TV but there you go, my memory fails me. I found that idea fascinating though. No memories of being a child. That would be so odd. I wonder if she ever had children of her own. What kind of Mother was she? How would she relate to their childhood? Surely the memories of our own childhood shape the way we raise our children. For good or for bad. Isn’t that why we hold on to traditions? To try to relive our childhood through our children’s experience of the same things we did when we were children.
I’ll stop now, I could go on and on.
*I am currently reading ‘Outliers’ by Malcolm Gladwell
This painting is available on etsy
Undecided
Another painting from my new series “Too Small, Too Young”.
Undecided, 15.5 “x 20”, mixed media painting on wood stretcher.
This series is about being a child now, looking back and/or remembering being a child and also about being an adult/parent watching your child grow up. It is bitter sweet to say the least.
Sometimes I find myself looking at my children and feeling unbearably sad. I know that this sounds crazy but it is because I am not really looking at them right now, instead I am thinking about how much smaller they were not so long ago or how soon they are going to be all grown and leaving me. Awful I know, but it is the truth. I think about how far away my own childhood seems now, how foggy my memories are. How young my parents were.
In many ways, these are timeless paintings. They live neither in or out doors but exist simultaneously in both. If as though, our memories can be in some other plain all together, existing in our mind but also in this place that shifts back and forth, in and out of focus. Often hard for us to grasp completely, save a snippet here, a smidgen there.
I guess in these works I am trying to capture childhood, mine and my children’s and to somehow hold onto it for a little bit longer. If I can’t manage it in real life, perhaps painting it will help me remember to think less and be more.
