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Southern Folk Art Magazine |
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Home Page
Link to Folk Art and Outsider
Art Galleries
Intuit, Chicago, IL Link to Review of Folk Fest In Atlanta, GA - August 15th, 16th, 17th, 2008
ARTISTS
What is Art
Brut? Recommended Recommended
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Memory Art I am a trained artist and art teacher. I have made art based on images that I remember from my dreams. I would think that many artists, trained and untrained, do this. I can’t speak however, for other artists and how they process images. I do remember a conversation I had with Jesse Aaron before he died. I was living in Gainesville, Florida at the time and he lived a few blocks from me. I went to see him because I was curious about what kind of person a folk artist he was and why his work looked the way it did. I asked him why he continually carved the same figure out of wood when he worked. He told me that he saw that face in his dreams. When he slept at night he saw the devil’s face and that is why he carved it out on his wood sculptures. You see, I thought that folk artists like him did their work mostly for the tourist trade. The tourists came to town and bought these strange objects and he did them because of demand. But I was wrong. He would have been carving them and putting them on the wood pile if no one was buying them. It was an effort to clear the image from his psyche. It occurred to me that he and I did the same thing when we worked. I have images that I see in my dreams and they stay in my conscience for long periods. The only way I have successfully gotten these images out of my conscious thoughts is to paint them out. That is, to make a painting of the image. Many times after making the painting I cannot even look at the artwork except with side glances. The image doesn’t seem to remain as prominently in my visual memory as it once did. Someone who produces the same image over and over may not be as fortunate. I never have a desire to paint the same picture again. Now I keep visual memories not so much in my mind but in slides and jpeg files on my computer. My mother who is 86 does memory paintings. She does not look at the object or objects she occasionally paints. She paints them from memory. An example of her work is on the first page of our website. It is her porch swing. She doesn’t enjoy painting pictures because she was not trained to draw or paint and doesn’t understand things like perspective. Regardless, her pictures are beautiful and pure. David Knopf |
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