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Mind and Matter


Untitled (Sweater) Eric Fischl describes his concept of "the art of memory."

"Painting is a memory act. And of course it can be a short-term memory, which is the time it takes you from looking at this figure to turning to paint that figure, or from the length of a brush stroke from one side to the other, or something like that.

"It can be that kind of memory, or that you could paint something like a lot of Abstract Expressionists where they would paint work and they'd constantly be painting it and then scraping it off, and painting on it and scraping it off, and painting on it. And when the painting was finished, it held within itself, on its surface, all of the memories of what it took to get to where it was."

Source: National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996).

Pictured: Eric Fischl, born 1948, Untitled (Sweater), 1992, solar plate intaglio on paper, 7 3/4 x 5 7/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase.