Nostalgia
At this time of year, and at these temperatures, we all crave warmth. I also crave the warmth of nostalgia during coldly threatening times of social and political hostility. Generally I avoid nostalgia in art, both because it can get corny and because I am not sure it points to the best way forward. Nostalgia leads to inaccurate mythologizing about the past, reactionary politics, and an inability to embrace the future fully. But we all love our warmest memories, and that urge is deeply human. I am more aware than most that memory is inaccurate! My boundaries are so porous that half the things I remember are mixed with my imagination and therefore untrustworthy! And yet, in a different way, they are most truthful, on an emotional level. In this spirit I set myself on a specific painting challenge.
I am trying to teach myself acrylic painting this winter. I use acrylic in mixed media collage already, but not for what I am calling “straight painting”, for lack of a better term. Straight painting, for me, simply means either straightforward representational imagery and/or using one painting media. Last winter’s experimentation with straight painting in oils made me realize that I simply do not have a work environment allowing oil painting, unless outside. My “studio” is my 5’x8’ bathroom! With some spillover into our small and only bedroom. Not healthy, hence acrylic. My challenge was selecting a bunch of interior and exterior photos of cabins in daylight, and trying to convert them to firelit interiors or window-lit nocturnes. I imagined light sources and exaggerated the warmth factor. I did about 25 of these 8”x10”s. I think I developed at least some familiarity with acrylics.
Choosing scenes from the past reminded me to try to paint in an old manner, kinda channeling Van Gogh’s ‘Potato Eaters’. But I also happen to have built and lived in cabins and shacks and used wood stoves- still do. The back-to-basics philosophy works for me in terms of meeting my basic needs in the simplest way. I also happen to believe that creatively meeting the problems of the future will require reassessment of how we meet our basic needs, so perhaps nostalgia has that useful and positive purpose?.
