Unraveling Pictures in My Memory – Arshile Gorky

Arshile Gorky / How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life / Oil on Canvas / 1944 / Seattle Art Museum

Great artists are not driven by theories or concepts, but by memory and sense impressions of hallucinatory vividness. Hence the centrality of the apron, the patterns of which foreshadow Gorky’s habit of drawing abstract forms from nature: “My Mother told me stories while I pressed my face into her long apron with my eyes closed.” In the painting named after it, the apron’s design is streaked and smeared, as if dissolved in the waters of memory and nostalgia: “All my life her stories and her embroidery kept unraveling pictures in my memory.” It is the unraveling that seems to be recorded in How My Mother’s Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life. {Read More…} -John Ash, ArtForum, Sept. 1995

Seattle Art Museum

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