While cooking dinner tonight I decided to dig out one of my old Joan Baez CDs. This was the more recent stuff, not the English folk song material she sang back in the sixties.* I was grabbed by the throat quite suddenly by her rendering of Diamonds and Rust. I believe that this is her characterisation of memory, and I can really relate to that, having spent several days sorting through old photographs.
These days I’m very much occupied with memory. The two compositions around which I’m circling cautiously are both based upon memories of earlier phases of life …. I might almost have said “earlier lives” they seem so long ago. Certainly they have the bright and crystalline quality of diamonds. This is a remarkable shift in the way in which I work, because up until now the substance of my art has been based upon current experience. Even my series based upon “holy stones” (ancient megaliths) was concerned very much with my encounter in the here and now with these objects. The series of images I painted based upon Italian experience of the Great War engaged with my personal response in the here-and-now to the continuing impact in our own day of this period of history.
Coming to think of it, the closest I have come to mining personal memory as a source of inspiration for my painting is the Four Quartets series. UI would like to think that not all of the “diamonds” embedded in that series were owed to T.S. Eliot.
*Once upon a time I used to play the guitar, and a fairly high proportion of the material I sang was borrowed from Joan Baez …. Henry Martin, Fare thee well, and all that stuff. I used to mix it with Yugoslav folk music. Those were the days! There’s a story attached to that, but I’ll save it for another day.