| “Composite sketches” or memory portraits are very interesting from a psychological point of view. What we memorize; how we recall things; why we recall this as opposed to that; why this way; was it like this; is it really like that? While painting, I initially concentrated on re-creating a close-to-real image of a human being along with surrounding aura, mood, or atmosphere that accompanies my idea of that person. What I think is quite natural, while writing about it is indeed trivial. I used my memory and emotional resources; however, with time, memory quickly became an insufficient guide to me. While trying to re-create not only an image kept in my memory but something more complete—a past experience, something ephemeral and without shape…. |  |
Maya Sikorska
“Composite sketches” or memory portraits are very interesting from a psychological point of view. What we memorize; how we recall things; why we recall this as opposed to that; why this way; was it like this; is it really like that? While painting, I initially concentrated on re-creating a close-to-real image of a human being along with surrounding aura, mood, or atmosphere that accompanies my idea of that person. What I think is quite natural, while writing about it is indeed trivial. I used my memory and emotional resources; however, with time, memory quickly became an insufficient guide to me. While trying to re-create not only an image kept in my memory but something more complete—a past experience, something ephemeral and without shape—apart from things I remembered and things I knew, I quickly started to utilize something which was always inside of me: a feeling. Then, the art of painting became a contemplation of the experience where form/shape does not determine the objectively defining frames anymore.
What sort of reality picture do we create, being aware of non-recurrence and transience of every event? Memory will not bring an experience of the past back into existence. Memory is some kind of a mirror which closes in its frames barely a particle, an ersatz—certain substance or gist—of what happens, additionally deformed by its crooked and blurred surface. That is why our desire to comprehend every experienced reality appears to be hopeless; for all memory pictures can ever give us is just an expression of what is already gone. What is gone does not exist anymore and memory is just a picture of non-existence. Bringing a memory picture to existence is not bringing back to existence what the picture is an image of. What remains are impressions and thoughts. All that lasts longest.
