On Memory (2)

Yesterday I heard a most beautiful and sad story. It is the story of painter Joe Andoe. Andoe reached fame first by his paintings of pasture landscapes from his home town of Tulsa. The theme was repeated hundreds of times and his pasture canvasses could be found in the most prestigious exhibitions from the Phillip Morris collection to the Metropolitan museum and MOMA. Soon his empty pasture landscapes started getting filled with idealized depictions of horses. And it was not much later that Andoe started compulsively creating body and face portraits of girls using a monochromatic palette. The girls, sometimes half or fully naked, looked astoundingly similar as if the same person had posed and had been drawn under different angles. Andoe was following his artistic impulse unquestionably until one day while sitting in his studio a memory from his early youth stroke him like a lightning. He was sixteen in Tulsa and he was in the back seat of his car with a naked young girl. His first love. The car was parked in the middle of a huge pasture not far from where route 66 makes its passing. Suddenly the two young lovers are astounded by the the face of a horse sticking its head at the rear window of the car. A shocked Andoe in his studio suddenly realizes that in his entire career he has been painting fragments of one afternoon that took place 30 years earlier. This single instantane of nonchalance and adolescent love permeated his entire work and defined him as an artist.
Saul Bellow had said: "Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door". If you had to choose one single memory to occupy your dreams and haunt your existence, a single engram encapsulating your passing through life what would that be?
Joe Andoe's paintings