Painting, Place and Memory

This is a legacy post. Originally written in 2015, when I was wholly in the throes of considering painting an alternate form of autobiography, I was obsessed with the link between vision and memory which seemed to me at the time to provide the best reason why painting should exist at all. I have spent much of the past few years trying to convert memory to writing but the original impulse, which arose from a collection of old black and white photographs taken on the Hawkesbury River, has since abated, and I am much more committed to exploring the idea of painting as a unique experiential domain which combines individual unconscious forces with collective cultural experience.

Painting offers the eternal return, images that reflect our human experiences, otherwise so transient and ephemeral.  Technological modernity has  fundamentally changed the experience of space and time. Photography and film  have transformed the visual world which now surrounds us with random excess.  But painting has the power to take some of that world back.  In my recent art practice I have moved between the vividness of the brightly coloured world and the sober nostalgia of a monochrome past.

I continue to explore the link between link painting and photography. I have also been developing a site specifically related to photography for my art practice.

Author: annettehamilton82

After life as an anthropologist, including years of fieldwork in remote Australia and Southeast Asia, I am now working on painting, photography, art and cinema and publishing fiction, memoir and children's stories. I spend most of my time in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney and at a house on the Hawkesbury River, where my family has lived since 1923. View all posts by annettehamilton82