Memories of a Place

Dear friend,

Bob and I like to “lop the road”. When we lived in the Bay Area, we loped the roads; when we moved to Asheville North Carolina, we loped the roads; and when we moved to Kennett Square Pennsylvania, we did the same.

I would take mental notes of the fleeting sceneries zooming by me 25, 35, 45, 55, 65, or 70 miles per hour. Most of the memories have faded and then forgotten. I try to recollect those memories of a time and place, but they are vague. Nothing lasts forever, but I can remember how I felt.

Memories are often vague recollections of a time and place. Ephemeral like an aromatic or unpleasant fragrance that could trigger memories that could trigger a range of emotions and physical sensations — feeling joyful, at peace, safe, sad, repulse, angry, pain or sick in the stomach.

I made this quick sketch soon after loping the roads around Kennett Square. Many of the roads with the sceneries that capture my imagination usually are not safe for Bob to pull over. I do not drive, so I make mental notes of the fleeting sceneries — to note the sense of the place in a fleeting moment in time.

This sketch on paper was made several years ago and I finally made a painting of it based on my vague memories of this place that zoomed by me as we loped the road. I think it was a cool morning and the light was soft or crisp. I think. It felt good to finally make this painting. It gave me joy.

It is not how an artist precisely describes something through a painting but how an artist conveys a sense of a place in a moment in time. It is poetry. It is music.

Memory of a place. Oil on panel, 4.5 by 14 inches. Private collection.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary

dear friend,

i started this painting over 10 years ago in philadelphia while a friend was going through cancer treatment. he did not get to ring the bell. a year ago i did not have to ring the bell because it was caught very early. i was spared the trauma and the struggle. it was not my time to go home, but the experience gave me deeper empathy for others.

Picasso said, “a painting is just another way of keeping a diary.” i took this painting out of storage this morning to work on it again. i am not sure that if i want to take it to a refine look.

every painting is like a memory of a fleeting feeling, a fleeting sense of a place, a fleeting moment in time, and a fleeting moment in a life on earth. on the other side, there is no human construct like time (or even religions, cultures, or genders), but a clock tick could be an earth day. perhaps 50 earth years will have pass, and when we meet them again on the other side, they will joyfully welcome us home. “we have left you just some moments ago!” they say as though they are surprise. “please,” they continue with unconditional love and joyful excitement, “share with us your experiences. what have you learned?”

in a world where you can be anything, be kind.

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Dear Friend,

Nature is a healer and a source of inspiration. Ansel Adams letter to his dear friend, Cedric Wright, is a beautiful testimony of its power to heal and to inspire.

Excerpt from Letters of a Nation

In 1936, in the midst of an unrelenting workload and the near-demise of his marriage, legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams suffered a nervous breakdown. After a stay in hospital, desperately in need of escape, Adams then returned with his family to the one place where he could find solace: Yosemite, California. When his health returned, he wrote a letter to his dear friend, Cedric Wright. Ansel Adams wrote, “For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.”

Adams so beautifully summed it up in his letter to his dear friend:

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

The Complete Letter to Cedric Wright from Ansel Adams

Dear Cedric,

A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that related to those who are loved and those who are real friends.

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only of flesh and blood — children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.

Friendship is another form of love — more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptance of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

I wish the thundercloud had moved up over Tahoe and let loose on you; I could wish you nothing finer.

Ansel

Source: Letters of a Nation by Andrew Carroll.