Words and Maps

36x36"  Balbec, France: As Imagined.

"These effigies preserved intact in our memory, when we recapture them, we are astonished at their unlikeness to the person whom we know, and we begin to realise what a task of remodelling is performed every day by habit. In the charm that Albertine had in Paris, by my fireside, there still survived the desire that had been aroused in me by that insolent and blossoming parade along the beach, and just as Rachel retained in Saint-Loup’s eyes, even after he had made her abandon it, the prestige of her life on the stage, so in this Albertine cloistered in my house, far from Balbec, from which I had hurried her away, there persisted the emotion, the social confusion, the uneasy vanity, the roving desires of life by the seaside."  -'The Captive,' by Marcel Proust in “Remembrance of Things Past.”

Detail from "Balbec, France: As Imagined"

Detail from "Balbec, France: As Imagined"

Step #1 

     And so, one of my favorite locations in 'Remembrance of Things Past,' has proven to be the seaside in Balbec- an imagined place, based on the town Cabourg, France.  The excerpt of text that I have included on the surface of the painting is a moment when the narrator remembers the way his love was when he first saw her on the beach.  It represents a memory of the place, and not a moment in the place itself.  My friend Kathy saw the painting, and put it best when she said that I am aiming for "A lyrical musing on location and memory- a sense of the fleeting quality of time."  As you can see, the projection that I begin with is dramatically different from the finished work, and yet it imparts an accuracy that I feel is critical for the work.  This particular painting lived in my brain for almost 2 months while I wanted to paint it.  I could not find the time, and moreover, I felt that it needed time to marinate.  In a similar fashion, I am now planning to create some far more personal maps.  Images of places that create the same feeling in me, that fleeting quality of time and space, the mystery of a moment that took place, and now exists quite vibrantly in my memory and no-place else.