Back to the Present
Do you ever find yourself looking back to the present? Memories drift from the past but update themselves in a strange way. They can hibernate for years...decades...then pop up suddenly. They are not just visions of living as you pass through time, but sensations that infiltrate your mind and senses—through your whole being...down to the bones.
For Patrice Henkel, “Broad Street Fog” is her present reality, but it is also a “glimpse of a previous era.” It could be something mysterious that nested in her subconscious early in life or along the way.
She has experienced a number of stages of development in both her personal and artistic lives, but growing up in an outdoor boating family in Michigan led her to look at nature aesthetically. It is why she has returned to plein aire landscape painting—not confined in a studio, but surrounded by life.
Often, early influences appear when you begin to paint or write and you can’t quite figure out where they came from—or why they linger.
“The Night of the Equinox” by Charles Burchfield, is a memory painting, reworked late in life from an early period, “...with joy and exuberance...”
He wrote: "1915 was the year that ideas came to me which were to haunt me the rest of my life; ideas and visions of paintings that were far beyond my ability or knowledge to carry out and still are, after fifty years, an unfulfilled dream".
But there were times noted in his journal that his creative energies froze and left him wondering if he could ever recover. His dreams sometimes turned to nightmares and followed him into his paintings.
Thierry Guillemin recently turned from abstract art to what he deems “figurative’ art. “These are a homage to nature and the light that emanates from the things that grow and take on unlimited forms.” He is also looking to the past to pay homage to his grandparent’s farm in eastern France.
“As a child I was deeply impressed by this universe where nature was so omnipresent and powerful. There was a sense of wonder in everything: a feeling of peace and light. It inspires my work as a painter.”
We are all artifacts of the past...a collection of fragments, experiences and visions that may hibernate for years—decades—and then emerge at an unexpected time. For me they can be horrific—that roller coaster of emotions we call PTSD. But the reassembled memories can be as wonderful as visiting the Grand Canyon as a 6 yr. old. Or listening to my mother sing. Or, as in my painting, sitting in Sabino Canyon as a child.
Some memories create themselves, picking up bits and pieces of reality. Or, perhaps, they’re just suggestions of things that might have happened–-fragments of a dream—a dream in which we find ourselves looking back within the present, and grabbing the joys that came early in life.
1. “Broad Street Fog” —Patrise Henkel www.patrise.com
2. “The Night of the Equinox” — Charles Burchfield
3. “Morning Mist, Catskills” — Thierry Guillemin —
https://thierryguillemin.com
I’ll take this as a reason to ask myself new questions. My upbringing was overflowing with nostalgia for a former time. No wonder I’m always looking for the history underlying the present.
Loved this post, especially all 4 paintings used to express the point.