WHAT THE WALL REMEMBERS
Pink is usually there first.
Sometimes underneath everything else.
It remembers childhood differently than I do.
There are three.
They are not always together.
They are not always three.
This has caused some confusion.
The rooms are less reliable.
One has no obvious entrance.
Another changes size depending on who is inside it.
There was a third.
We don’t use it anymore.
Faces behave differently here.
One can contain another.
A person can appear twice without there being two people.
A hand can belong to someone who hasn’t arrived yet.
Mirrors are permitted, but I don’t trust them.
The paintings have the same problem.
Some have been several paintings.
Finished.
Then finished again.
Then buried.
There may be three or four complete lives underneath the one you are looking at.
Occasionally part of an earlier one comes through.
I usually let it.
It was there first.
Nothing painted over is gone.
It simply changes where it lives.
This applies to people too.
Some paintings have had easier lives than others.
Some have been soaked.
Some scorched.
Some covered in black plastic and left there.
Some have been scratched with stone.
Not a tool made to imitate stone.
The stone itself.
Its edge has a history of its own.
When it crosses the surface, both histories change.
The mark could not have happened exactly that way twice.
That matters.
Fire is less precise.
Water has no respect for composition.
Plastic leaves its own geography.
A scratch knows exactly where it has been.
Paint tries to organize everything afterward.
Sometimes successfully.
Love has its own architecture.
So does fear.
They occasionally use the same room.
This is inconvenient.
The boy knows more about this than I do.
He remembers the colors.
The noise.
The faces inside faces.
He is unreliable about almost everything else.
There are rules.
Most are simple.
Three returns.
Pink remembers.
Rooms keep what happens inside them.
Beauty is allowed anywhere.
Fear does not get to own what it touches.
A face is not required to remain one face.
Anything buried may return somewhere else.
And nothing becomes itself all at once.
There are exceptions.
There are always exceptions.
Sometimes a figure disappears from one painting and turns up years later in another.
Sometimes only the color returns.
Sometimes a hand.
Once, just the space where something should have been.
I recognized that too.
A painting can survive several identities without choosing between them.
The one you see is simply the one currently facing you.
Underneath it are decisions, accidents, heat, water, scratches, old figures, abandoned colors, things repaired, things deliberately ruined, and things I could never reproduce because I don’t know exactly how they happened the first time.
They don’t disappear when the image changes.
They become ancestry.
This is probably why a perfect surface makes me nervous.
It hasn’t lived anywhere yet.
There is a doorway that appears occasionally.
I have never painted what is on the other side.
At least not knowingly.
The paintings continue beyond their edges.
I know that sounds strange.
It is considerably stranger when one remembers something from another.
There is a place behind all of this.
“Behind” is probably the wrong word.
So is “place.”
Maybe identity is closer.
Not the image.
Everything that had to happen before the image could exist.
Pink is usually there first.
I mentioned that already.
Good.
You’ll see why eventually.