Memory and Imagery

There's not another road anywhere that looks like this road. . . . It's a one of a kind of place. . . . like someone's face. Mike Waters in "My Own Private Idaho"

Susan Abbott. Sketchbook, Pitt pen and watercolor

The first eight years of my life our family lived in a brick bungalow on a narrow street, with a median strip separating our small house from a four-lane highway.

In my earliest memory, I'm standing on that median strip looking at flowers with white petals, yellow dots in the center and long green stems.

I don’t notice the trucks roaring by or the cars parked in a long row in front of each identical house. The flowers on the median strip completely absorb me. I’m happy.

Gustav Klimt, Meadow in Flower, oil

My second memory is of standing in the gutter next to the median strip after an evening rainstorm. The air smells damp, the last of the sun peeks out from behind clouds and warms my shoulders.

I’m looking down at oily patches that reflect the pale blue and pink of the sky and I’m moving those patterns of color around with my red rain boots. What fun to make the colors come and go, mix and dissolve!

Joseph Raffael, Water Painting Number 5, watercolor

More memories from the empty lot next to our house: In spring sitting invisible inside the big branches of a forsythia, in summer walking through tall grass searching for wild onions that I’d smash on a flat stone into little cakes, like an Indian girl on the prairie.

Fairfield Porter, Spring Landscape, oil

In warm weather, sitting on my front steps I’d hear a soundtrack of chain saws with their high-pitched whine and children calling to each other up and down the street.

In winter while I trundled through the side lot’s snow, I’d listen for the clack clack clack of cars with snow chains on their tires moving slowly along the highway.

Susan Abbott, Winter Street, Graphite and watercolor

Not too long ago, on a trip back to Washington, DC I drove down the access road and by this house to show my husband where I'd spent my earliest years.

Of course, it was all changed. The grassy empty lot now had a building on it, my hide-away forsythia was long-gone, there were no daisies on the median strip.

And everything was so much smaller than I remembered it, my kingdom of meadow and forest and stream miniaturized down to a reality that was hard for the adult me to even recognize.

Richard Bechtle, Houses on Clay Street, watercolor

I’m well past my childhood years but somehow have retained the sense that an ordinary place—even a dusty median strip or empty lot—can hold some magic and be more than what it seems.

Any four lane road, daisy patch, or forsythia bush that I look at today, every chain saw or snow tire I hear, is still filtered through my childhood imagination.

That potent mix of memory and imagery lives on, and I believe that, more than anything else, is the reason why I (and maybe you?) paint.

Your comments are welcome below!