In Search of Lost Memories

Dear Friends,

The spring came early this year in New York City, in Tokyo and in Ljubljana too, and perhaps in many other places around the world also (where are you reading this blog?). The local flower shops in New York City are filled with spring flowers. The theme for this blog is about searching lost memories of its original shape. 

Before I start, I wanted to share some progress images of my paintings in this blog but I decided to share with you in the next blog. I have been spending most of the March for painting, and making sketches and researches months before, please look forward to see them.

Back to the spring flowers, everything about them are loveable, even the fact that they won't stay bloomed forever. Flowers are beautiful to our eyes..., but I feel if we live much closer to the ground, they will first excite us with their sweet scents before their visuals. Being a painter makes me experience something similer too. For instance, like the fine tipped paint brushes that have only a few hairs on the tip... no matter how gently we use and clean them everytime, those brushes do not last for long, regardless of the care, if we use them. But they are made to be used not to be stored in a new jewel box. I see similarities in the flowers and the painting brushes. 

I have been trying to imagine how spring made us feel back then, much before when we had cameras and cinema and when we didn't have inventions that let us travel far away, when it took hours to cut a tree. I think animals and insects still feel the same joy from that time about the spring. 

Lately I have been also reading Curious Creatures in Zoology (1890) by John Ashton (1834-1911). It's my bathroom book so it will take a while to finish, but it's a nice reading. Not everything in this book is new for you if you are interested in these creatures but interesting how it track down to connect one to another. I forgot when I got this book by the way, I just found it while I was moving some of my books from studio to home, but I can tell why I got this book. If you like my art or my writing, you will probably enjoy it too.

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I have been spending my time searching my lost memories this past month while I was painting. 

When it comes to memories, I think half of our brain's job is to filter and forget some memories. (While the rest of them are sent to archive, or stored in our immediate memory drawers.) I enjoy spending hours trying to get back the small memories that my brain decided to discard. It is like a game to me, one of very few games that I never get bored of. 

I will share with you two memories I was trying to remember this month. They are small pieces of memories that would not affect my life at all if I didn't remember. They are only important to me because my heart wanted them to stay. 

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The first lost piece of memory: A Place

Today(3-25-2021), I finally found where the place was, and it really existed (mostly). 

It started when I searching Invader art the other day that I noticed my memory is missing. I was searching about Invader art in Tokyo to suggest to my mother to explore the city in a new way. Then I suddenly remembered about a location with an invader mosaic on a wall. There were small-town-like streets, houses were connected and first floors were mostly stores, and second floors were like apartments. The roads were clean(unlike New York City), and there were flowers blooming in planters along the street. Everyone was walking to the same way to a distination, I think I was alone but wasn't sure. I think there was a small cute bakery too along the way. I was on my way to a destination and everyone was also heading, the destination I cannot remember. On the way there was a beautiful door-less antique store, spacious with a big skylight, on the left side of the street that I want to visit again. Beautiful weather. The road was spreading into two, at the spread there was a light yellow wall facing me that had a small graffiti art. 

I did take pictures of the wall, but I am not sure which camera I used, but I do remember about seeing the pictures I took there.

From Google map street view

Everytime I notice about something I cannot remember, it becomes a restless time until I finally remember it. I even thought about looking up all the locations by the artist, of which I have visited in the world, but what if the art was not invaded? I already looked up dozens of invader street art locations but none of them was the place I was looking for. Back then, I didn't know about the invader app, and what if the graffiti I remembered as an invader was something else, or one of many fake invaders?

Anyway I narrowed down possible locations to Washington DC, San Francisco (near the museums and botanical garden), Boston(but unlikely as I stayed there only a half day), Paris and around, and a few prefectures in Japan. Then I looked up invader's street art in those locations.  I wanted to remember where I was going, and name of the antique store, and I wanted to find out about the street art. But after a few days of searching and trying to remember, I still couldn't find them and I started to really think it might be my dream, or it wasn't invader art that I remember there. The invader art was the only thing that could lead me to find the location since I couldn't remember any other identifiable infomation. I was thinking too much and I started to see dreams about it, and that made it more difficult to separate the vague memory and the dreams. 

A few more days after, I finally found it and confirmed it on the google map. It was a road to the Versailles from the station in France, so I was heading to Versailles. It must be in 2019 my second visit to France when I visited there alone. Only the wall wasn't yellow, it was light beige. Also, the houses there were three storeys not two storeys. Plus the invader art wasn't quite the same from what I remember, maybe I mixed up with one in a different location. But the antique store was exactly as I remembered. 

From Google map street view

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The second lost memory:

Five days ago, I finally rediscovered one memory, by searching keywords on google for day after day. 

It was a movie that I couldn't remember the title, but only a fracture of images: An eldery man who is an art professor, difficult / struggling appearance but uniquely attractive, grey city like post war, dull atmosphere and heavy architectures, some feeling of communism, and some protests against avant garde art. First I searched it on Google in English first for a few days, just typing out all the keywords I could come up from my memory, it didn't come up. But I finally found it in Japanese. five days ago.

Afterimage (2016) by the Polish director Andrzej Wajda.--

I will like to rewatch it sometime soon, maybe after the two paintings I have been working on finished. 

Anyway, lost memory searching is a serious business for me and one search goes on until I remember. It is nothing to be worried about, we lose many memories everyday. I search my small pieces of lost memories. It is also not strange as a behavior that I seek them, I think. Perhaps I'm just a control freak that I want to oversee and manage what memories are going to be gone as much as I can, and I just have time to do so. 

I cannot believe this movie came out only 4-5 years ago

Indeed, I do it every month with different memories, and I have been doing it for years. I think it is because I have plenty of time in my studio alone to do so. It's unhealthy to to be trapped in the past but it is totally okay to think about it, otherwise our brain will keep erasing the memories that you might want to hold on to it, but if it's not too late you could probably track it to get it back to us like chasing the recycle car to take back the peit diamond necklace we accidently put in the trash bin. 

We don't need to worry about small memory loss, it's completely healthy, but for me it helps to experience and realize the memory to be gone missing because my art relates to real life experiences and the memories and imagination and dreams.