In my studio right now I am working on a set of paintings, each one is about a person I know. How do you quantify a person on a 12 inch by 12 inch piece of paper? Is it because I'm afraid I will forget them, or because I want to show them I love them, or because they are the corners or my mind and secret places of my heart.
There is a game I like to play with my friends and in my head when I get bored, maybe it is an obsession with reducing life down to something that I can handle, put in my pocket and save, or consequently put in a painting. The quintessential game consists of thinking about the most quintessential things about a person, place or time. For example, once we were playing the quintessential outfit game with a group of my guy friends, they concluded that my quintessential outfit was like a sister missionary only more hip. In which case, my time stamp outfit would be a jumper with a little grey sweater and a pair of the boots i always wear in winter. unfortunate? maybe.
If i were to play the quintessential memory game to describe my parents, this is the memory I would choose: It was probably the summer after my freshman year in college, I had come home around 1 a.m., as I approached the closed front door I heard something inside. I put my ear to the wood but still couldn't quite make out the sound, I opened it to find that the noise I'd been hearing was a beach boys record spinning on the record player. My parents were sitting on our green, worn in, leather couches next to each other. I don't think they were actually holding hands, but I like to manipulate memory for the sake of romanticism and sanity and insert that detail as well.
My poetry professor always says that once something is on paper, your responsibility is no longer to portray accurate reality or history, but your responsibility is to what you've written.
1 comment:
How are you so quotable?
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