Sight occupies a great deal of the brain, and seeing is mainly remembering. Even though snow is not always white, but often blue or gray, you see a white surface, and conclude the the white, blue, and gray matter is the thing you call snow, and think of as white. To see snow as white, you need memory. It is the same with faces. The first time you see a face you may conclude that a hat belongs to the face.
When you paint, you look and look into the canvas, you take a few steps back and look for that image which is already there. To paint is therefore a search into ones memory.
Hopefully, you don't reproduce a painting already present in the physical world, but you take parts from many different pictures, and make something which was not present in them, and not in the sum of them. Good art, and writing, is bigger than the sum of all the parts. I don't know, if that is the case in this painting of mine, but it is a good example of how non-verbalized memory - or if you want, the subconscious - may work, in a creative process.
Flying Dutchman
41x56 cm. Mixed media on canvas.
This painting consists of at least three pictures, one from my school days. I suspect that it was in one of the history books, even though it is a story from the Bible, trying to explain the origin of different languages. (Nowadays we have a much more plausible theory, and it has nothing to do with God, or the hubris in men.)
( 1935-37)
Perhaps it is not so obvious were this wonderful painting is blended into my painting. Again, it is the shape, even though mine is clearly more vertical. The foreground which is filled with flowers (dying?) in Ernst's painting, is in mine lies in darkness. Perhaps, there is something missing (I mean, except talent).
The last painting I found in my own, is Arnold Böcklin's romantic painting Die Toteninsel from 1883. (Death is an Island somewhere in the Mediterranean, and presumably quite crowded.) But again, memory is not to be trusted. In my mind it is still much darker, I mean, it my memory it actually looks a lot more like my painting.
I suspect that there is even a fourth or fifth painting dwelling there somewhere.
Hope you are well.
Yours sincerly,
The last painting I found in my own, is Arnold Böcklin's romantic painting Die Toteninsel from 1883. (Death is an Island somewhere in the Mediterranean, and presumably quite crowded.) But again, memory is not to be trusted. In my mind it is still much darker, I mean, it my memory it actually looks a lot more like my painting.
I suspect that there is even a fourth or fifth painting dwelling there somewhere.
Hope you are well.
Yours sincerly,
