A Memory of an Image
I’m building a house in Montenegro. The architect is a friend, and we mostly communicate through images. A year ago, I began with a blank slate — an empty Pinterest board. At first, it was just a slow accretion of images. I gathered shapes, structures, and materials instinctually, without much deliberation. This went on for almost a year without really thinking, or at least not thinking in a conscious, directed way. In particular, I avoided thinking about the interior and color palette. That’s for the end.
As is often the case with such things, after one accumulates enough, the left hemisphere of the brain becomes dominant and one begins to spot patterns. Something resembling a direction emerges — a kind of aesthetic attractor, pulling me toward an endpoint I couldn’t quite see but somehow already trusted. Then, about a month ago, I arrived at that endpoint. Like sinking into quicksand, but without the panic.
Raw concrete with sharp, precise edges. (The builder says we’ll need the really fine sand for that type of concrete work. We call it nula — zero — or jedinica — one).) Black and blue — pitch black and a specific kind of blue, like lapis lazuli. A blue that does strange things to your retina, hovering on the edge of optical illusion. Then: natural materials with tendons and pulsing veins — marble and wood etched with the calligraphy of time. Shiny and reflective metal surfaces. Elemental Earth, veined and alive, cloaked in a transcendent blue aura.
Then the Pinterest algorithm began to play along. First, glowing jellyfish suspended in the ink-black ocean. Bioluminescence — living light. Then, a flood of images: high-rise interiors seemingly from the 80s and 90s with gleaming surfaces glowing blue against the dark. (For the record, Pinterest’s recommendation algorithm has gotten very good. I really rate it for projects like this. Years ago, I interned at Kobo and worked on their book recommendation system — an experience that turned me into a bit of a recommendation algorithm connoisseur, lol.)
Fast forward to almost a year into the process — recently, just a few weeks ago — a fragment of memory from a long-dormant part of my mind surfaced, like a sea creature breaking water. I remembered this framed artwork from our first apartment in Canada. The previous owners had left it behind, and though my mother disliked it, it hung on the wall until we moved out — first in the living room, then later in the bedroom. We didn’t have money to spend on frivolous things like art, to replace it with something ‘better,’ so it stayed, evidently accumulating a talismanic significance. A few weeks ago, I described it to my father. He didn’t remember it but promised to dig through old photo albums.
When he came back with the image, I was surprised at what I saw. It was so beautiful and utterly unique. I half-expected my child mind to have aggrandized it, to find the adult reality disappointing. But no — even through the blurry, grainy replica, my much more mature and worldly mind still saw something brilliant and unique in its color palette and composition. Turns out children are in fact more attune and sensitive to such things.
That blurry fragment of an old film photo is of course inadequate. The original was glossy and vibrant, the gold parts were metallic, almost like gold leaf. It was gilded in a way that felt far more luxurious than it had any right to be. Now I recall making a lot of art in high school with gold leaf.
The black margins of the image were so thick, deliberate, and imposing. The way the chaos of scribbles went past those black margins blew my little mind. In the center was an abstract figure, something almost biological, oceanic, but also not. In the bottom center there is cursive writing in gold. I don’t know whether my child mind wasn’t able to read it or if it was intentionally unintelligible, not meant to be read. The whole composition now buzzes faintly in a wide subnetwork of neurons in the back of my mind. There was also this grid — a hand-drawn net that extended beyond the margins in gold, a chaotic attempt at order. I remember staring at it for long periods of time, trying to decode its logic. Some squares were gold, some were colored, some left blank.
Now, I’m on a quest to find it. Google Image Search has been useless — nothing even remotely similar comes up. For someone who considers themselves fairly well-versed in art history, its style is unplaceable to me. It feels entirely unique. I never came across anything like it.
If anyone knows where I can find the original, that would be awesome, lol.
