Over the past few days I have been sorting through a large collection of old photographic slides which I had accumulated. The experience has been an odd one in several respects, and not only because of the mystification I often experience about the places and people I chose to picture. A large part of the peculiarity of the process has been the result of my realisation of the fact that I was a very different person back then. I have tried to imagine myself back into the head of the person I see looking out at me in several of these shots. This difference crystallised for me this afternoon in the realisation that over all of those years I did so little painting or drawing.
This came into focus as question in particular in relation to my experiences in Yugoslavia. I first visited the country in the Easter of 1967, and few years can have passed between then and my last visits, after war had destroyed it. On average I must have spent more than a month in every year in one part of another. Even so, now that I look back over those years of experience I realise that there were precious few occasions on which I responded to the place as an artist. I have a small drawing of olive trees in Dubrovnik, and remember a sketch of the mountains of Albania viewed from across the waters of Lake Ohrid, although I can’t find that now. There is an informal sketch of the old synagogue in Sarajevo. For all the friendships I developed there, I think that I only ever did one small portrait sketch. For some reason I do not understand my response to the places and people I came to know so well was rarely triggered in the form of visual representation.
How very strange!
By the way: in my last post I mentioned my need to overcome my inertia about beginning a new composition. Since then I have been in email contact with two people I want to model for me. It’s a start!