Between Memory and Fact Abstract Art
On What We Remember, What Happened and What the Distance Between Them.
Imagine you are standing in a landscape you knew well a long time ago. A place that mattered to you. You have a clear picture of it in your mind, the colours, the scale of it, the feeling of being there.
Now imagine you return to it after many years and find that it is not quite as you remembered. The road is narrower than you thought. The building smaller. The distance between two points is shorter than the long journey your memory has made of it.
The place is real. Your memory of it was real. But somewhere between the two, something shifted. And you are left standing in the gap, wondering which version to trust.
This is quite unsettling territory that this abstract painting and this post try to inhabit. Not to resolve it. Simply to look at it honestly.
Fact is what happened. The date, the place, the words that were spoken, the sequence of events as they actually unfolded. Fact does not bend. It does not soften with time or sharpen with longing. It simply is – fixed, exact, indifferent to how we feel about it.
Memory is something else entirely. Memory is what we make of what happened. And from the very first moment, it begins to change. We remember what struck us most deeply, what left a mark, what moved us, what frightened or delighted or stayed with us in ways we couldn’t fully explain at the time. The rest recedes. And what matters is not the event itself but our experience of it, filtered through who we were, what we needed, what we were capable of understanding in that moment.
Over time, that filtering continues. We revisit certain memories again and again, and each revisiting subtly reshapes them. We soften the edges of things that were too painful to hold in their original form. We brighten the moments we loved, make them warmer and more golden than perhaps they were. We rearrange, without meaning to, until the memory tells a story we can live with, a story that makes sense of who we became.
Is this dishonest? I don’t think so. I think it is simply human. The mind is not an archive. It was never designed to store facts unchanged. It was designed to help us survive, to make meaning, to carry the weight of a life without being crushed by it. Memory serves that purpose. It is an act of interpretation as much as recall.
But here is the part that unsettles, the part worth sitting with rather than explaining away. If memory drifts from fact, and if we trust our memories as the truth of what happened, then what we call our past is in some sense a construction. Not a lie. Not a distortion we chose deliberately. But a version. One is shaped as much by who we are now as by what actually occurred then.
And then there is the reversal, perhaps the most quietly remarkable thing of all. A fact, left long enough, becomes a memory. It loses its hard edges. It absorbs the feelings that surrounded it. It begins to drift in the same current as everything else we remember. Time does not preserve facts the way we imagine it does. It slowly transforms them into something warmer, more uncertain, more subject to the same human shaping as the rest of our inner lives. The fact and the memory, given enough time, become harder and harder to tell apart.
The painting for this piece holds that uncertainty in its layers, what is beneath and what is on the surface, what shows through and what is obscured, what was laid down first and what came later and changed the colour of everything underneath. There is no single truth in the canvas. There are only layers, each one real, each one partial, each one altering what came before.
Think of a memory you have carried for a long time, one you are certain of. And then ask yourself, gently and without judgement: how much of it is what happened, and how much of it is what you needed it to be? Can you tell the difference? And does it matter or is the memory itself, by now, its own kind of truth?
This is the fourth painting and blog post in the series Between Two Points, an exploration of the thresholds we all live between. You can also read the earlier posts in the series:
More paintings and posts will follow soon.
I hope you will stay with me.
