underwater/waterfall Painting

The collective is always in the making of individual memory. Making an assumption that identity is located in our memories I continue thinking about the absorption of objects and spaces into my cultural identity. In underwater/waterfall, marked rather unconsciously, the visual elements are still very much collections of memories. The first panel feels both airy and solid, while the second piece looks rather like earth and water (it’s muddy). The movement of the second panel doesn’t go against gravity like the first painting does, instead following its direction, contrasting the airy qualities on the left canvas. I realized every time I look at the dark olive green shape in the second painting (bordering the largest orange shape), I think of my mom’s plastic spatula. Memory so frequently relies on objects. The borders between the shapes highlight the separateness, the uniqueness of each of the color-fields. The composition holds them together in a harmonic manner but things can fall apart at any point easily. The imagery I ended up with reminds me a lot of the cartoons I grew up watching, Armenian and Russian animations from the communist years (Abu Hasani Mashikner is a great example). The more I explore painting the more I see how much the patterns and colors I grew up seeing have influenced my hand.