August 22, 2018
I'm gonna keep this short. Kind of.
The thought process usually happens when I'm paddle boarding, that sudden need to remember everything around me. Teetering off the edge of my paddle board with my calves and feet dangling in the middle of the cool lake, I started laughing a little maniacally. Definitely laughing weirdly, borderline laughing in a way that made me wonder if I ate or drank something that had been laced with some kind of laugh-inducing party drug. I realise that kind of drug probably doesn't exist, but I'm not very well versed in party drugs, so bear with me here. Anyway, I mean I was looking at the lake water and how it touched the William R. Bennett Bridge, which was touching the evening sky, and I was so taken aback by the beauty that I started laughing in disbelief.
There was so much beauty in that fleeting moment that, once I was away from it, a part of me felt a small obsession with retaining that memory, in a different form.
All because I've been thinking a lot about how we remember moments. Like, how is the best way to do it so we actually remember every part of it? I think I worry about not remembering things because I'm used to worrying about that, having grown up with ADHD. I would get excited about everything at once, and the most challenging bit was savouring one single thought at a time. It has always taken a very special interest to calm my thought speed- usually large atlases, bugs, and tree climbing, painting.
Painting allows me to turn my experiences into textures, sizes into colours, bursts of energy into shapes, all while remaining a completely physical event, to mirror where the memory originated.
So it seems the more I do, the more I want to do with paint. Each pattern, texture, colour, are all translations of an abstract sensation.
I'll leave it at that for now, but I guess what I'm saying is, welcome to an abstracted visual catalogue of my memories.
- Ang