Portrait of a Young Saltimbanque
oil on panel
36 x 26 inches
oil on canvas
28 x 28 inches
Further Revisits to Childhood
“ To be an artist is to never fully relinquish childhood.” – Pablo Picasso
Following-up on my previous blog about the experience of childhood artmaking and how it informs artists’ present art, I want to mention three other artists whose remembrances of childhood have influenced their work. Their creative output can be seen in on-line galleries, and in some cases at Atlanta-Area gallery spaces.
The painter, C. Dawn Davis who currently has work at the Matre Gallery in Atlanta, (http://www.matregallery.com/davis/paintings/) frequently represents child-like figures in her oil paintings. These personages appear in unusual costumes and theatrical settings. Ms. Davis has written of the persistence of childhood memory as it reappears in her work:
“If you are someone who can read another language well enough, then you know the feeling of understanding in head and heart of what is being said, but find it impossible to give another the exact translation. You are thinking in the other language. So it is with my paintings. The same elements reappear – figures posed in costumes and masks accompanied by birds or monkeys in spaces undefined except by color and geometry. I do realize…that these ideas are grounded in remembered reality. As a child, I saw an organ grinder and his monkey and have been haunted for years by the sadness of his wizened little face and the way he looked at me when I gave him my dime. I don’t always know what I’m trying to say when I start a painting and many times the outcome is just as mysterious to me as it may be to the viewer. Our childhood memories follow us wherever we go. They collect themselves and are presented again and again whether or not we are fluent in their language.”
Perusing Ms. Davis’ website evidences a continued interest in images that well up from the past: http://www.cdawndavis.com/. Here, then, are a few examples of her work:
Let me introduce two other artists whose work is similarly evocative and worth viewing as a stimulus to examining one’s own memories of childhood. Possibly such recollections will initiate an analysis of how such memories can infuse one’s artistic life. I recommend a little research into their work for anyone who wishes to plumb the depths of a seemingly inexhaustible spring of creative inspiration…memories of childhood.
Working often in oil on a large scale, Mark Dylan Hyde paints images that are surreal in their dreamlike juxtaposition of unusual combinations of objects. “Relics of a Rainy Afternoon,” (2001) is a visual visit to a remembered attic of antiquated bits and pieces, the sticky memories that remain attached to an adult artist. Mr. Hyde wrote quite eloquently of childhood memory as it informs and influences his art:
“We can never revisit childhood, not in the sense of a returning to or a recreation of one’s past. We can return to childhood only in memory, and our ability to remember childhood, although a wonderful gift, is also an elusive one. We watch our children and try to remember our own lives. Our most precious possessions are those things, like photographs and portraits, which facilitate lucid memory. We know there can be no turning back the clocks. Inherent in memory is a strong sense of nostalgia, a longing for that which has been lost, for that which is irretrievable. To remember the past is to gaze through a window blurred with leftover rain or obscured by sunlight. We are left with fragments of sensation, with half-glimpses and veiled intimations. These paintings are meditations on memory. They attempt to capture the intangible half-glimpses of memory and hold them still. It is small and commonplace, the quiet and empty, illuminated for an instance, imbued with mystery by an ebbing afternoon light, that triggers memory. I work with the residues of memory; with long-forgotten photographs, keepsakes that weren’t kept, tattered pages from a diary that went unwritten, the relics of memory. The memories of childhood are temporal; tidal pools of stranded impressions, water held in a cupped hand. They can become a haunting presence in the painter or poet. The ghost of one’s childhood dwells within the soul of the artist. We could not relinquish it even if we wanted to. It is always there. It is an anachronistic appendage that was never fully shed, and whether consciously, or unconsciously, it suffuses in us an inviolate sense of wonder, essential to all creativity. But we cannot go to it. It must come to us. The memories of childhood are whispers, the voices of ghosts. It is the whispering of these ghosts of childhood that evokes memory and informs these paintings.”
Hyde’s website is worth a view to see examples of the art he alludes to in his statement:
http://www.markdylanhyde.com/ T h e G r e e n C r o w S t u d i o
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