MEMORY (V)

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I’ve always loved the narrative neatness of Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, being the mother of the Nine Muses in mythology: memory birthing art and history.

You can’t possibly remember something exactly as it was, and how you remember it changes over time based on the current you. Alan Watts unforgettably calls memory the “corpse of an experience” and sees it as a reason for our inability to be truly present.

But our past and how we remember it is also what makes us, us. Memory makes “invisibles present” as Hannah Arendt has written.

It is abstract, layered, twisted, with frayed edges, burdensome, wonderful, and essential. Part of a series.

20h x 20w x 0.5d (inches); linen, muslin, oil paint, acrylic on wood-backed canvas