Memory + Oblivion
John Tomlinson
July 2010

As an artist with a foundation in traditional drawing and art history, I have come to believe that Memory is the driving force of art, with Time as its engine, and Oblivion as its fuel (which will inevitably run out). Memory, yes, but not just personal remembrances or the under-surface memories of pain, desire and disappointment from my youth, not just biography.

I am addressing the idea of memory as sensory, sensational and sensual, something we share as human beings across all divisions and differences, including historical time. Memory can be a vague silhouette, a whiff of scent, a distant sound, a wave of feeling. It is life lived through light, fragrance, odor, touch soothing, sexual or painful, warmth and cold, dark, sounds and rhythms booming, rustling or harmonic, shapes, colors, objects, voices and whispers, movement, silence, and tastes.

Memory marks the life lived and passing, racing up to the present and shooting past us into forgetting and nothingness. Art can, must, will help us to recall it, to recall it again and hold it, savor it, not as the thing or moment itself but as the memory of its sensation.
Art is the agent of memory.

We have to let go of the event, sense or object as we move through time and space, but the work of art is the station, the receptacle, the safeguard, the treasury - and the transmitter - of the memory, of the life lived and the lives shared.

For me the power of art lies in its ability to evoke memory sensations, enabling the viewer to complete the work of art by creating its deeper meaning in his and her mind. The artist creates half the work; the viewer creates the other half.