echiummemory

"My painting 'Memory of an Echium' isn't just an impression of what I remember the plant looking like. I actually drew the shape from life, while referencing the Echiums out of my studio window. But by now I have been drawing Echiums non-stop for two months and have spent three years among them, in and around the university campus. The drawing is aided by my experience and my lengthened relationship with them. They've always been there, even when I paid less attention to them. I know their shape. I dream about echiums that do not exist. I see drawings of echiums clearly drawn by me but don't exist when I close my eyes.
I've also made many digital scans of Echiums and other botanical foliage - and moved around/explored these digital forms or computer impressions or artificial echoes. I am familiar with these forms and the polygonagonal and fuzzy and noisy imperfections they have.
This is reflected in my process of physically making the painting.
There are layers of paint, distorted with turpentine, and then decaying areas where I poured chemicals directly over the canvas. My memory is imperfect to visual reality, like digital echoes of reality, influenced and mediated by my experience and memory.
The final painting feels fuzzy, sticky, and thick. The plant form is distorted and rusty, affected by what surrounds it. It feels finite, a moment, soon it will be gone with something else in its place."

-Excerpt from my journal 14/5/21