The Gallery of Memories
There are a lot of potters making videos on the internet.
Plenty of voices and hands showing and telling how to make pots.
In an effort to make this more personal I have chosen to write and read portions of my life.
This is my Gallery of Memories.
A gallery of grey matter that features paintings of my favorite moments in life.
The first entry in this series is called, The Cap Gun.
I grew up watching The Lone Ranger and Tonto, nearly countless westerns, and some Warner Brothers cartoons that are now indisputably racist.
The Cap Gun captures the reality of my childhood. With all the above mentioned influences that, myself, my siblings, and my friends viewed every day, it is no wonder that we often played cowboys and indians.
It is a fact of history that this practice among children was once commonplace.
It will be interesting to see what playful practices among children now go rightfully into the history bin.
The Cap Gun
The past is in my mind.
It is painted with muted colors, muted textures, and with foggy unclear details.
Yet, mixed in with the unclear memories, are moments from the past that seem painted with precise detail.
It is as though a master painter and an amateur shared the same canvas.
Each painting is simultaneously finished and incomplete.
I am the painter within, and it is by my disembodied hand that both the works of masterpiece and of the novice come to life.
Mixed with the skillfully rendered and blundered paint, lie incomplete spaces.
These are places where my brush fails to describe anything at all from the past.
Did I erase those parts myself?
Did my brain get too full and remove portions?
In the gallery hanging in grey matter are rows and rows of paintings.
In a prominent space hangs one of my favorites.
This is a painting of a young boy playing cowboys and indians with his brother and friend. He climbs a hill with a cap gun in hand. His gun-belt at his waist and his boots struggling to gain traction as he climbs a small hill. He climbs with the knowledge that his enemies are just above.
Gun in hand, he peeks his head over the rim of the hill ready to fire. Prepared for the smell of gunpowder escaping from beneath the hammer as he fires repeatedly. I can picture even now how the toy guns mechanisms work. The roll of caps with small dots of gunpowder covered in paper, will continue to feed past the guns hammer with each shot.
I see too at that very moment a rock striking the boy in the head just above his left eye, though the memory of pain is incomplete.
He loses consciousness and finds that he is now at the bottom of the hill.
How did he get there?
Gun still in his hand, he stumbles home and suddenly finds himself in bed with a cold cloth on his forehead and his mother looking worriedly down upon his small form. He doesn't remember climbing into bed.
I remember anger in her eyes. My mind recalls a brothers response to angry questioning.
"Nicholas did it!"
This is but one of the many paintings that hang in my gallery, each ready to be shown to visitors.
It is a strange reality that the art of memory is only available when a person becomes an artist who is willing to display the past.
Artists are born when they stop locking their paintings into vaults and invite others in.
