Memory is defined in the dictionary as ‘the mental capacity or faculty of retaining and reviving facts, events, impressions, or of recalling or recognising previous experiences’. How that process works is still a mystery as is why some impressions are registered and retained and others are not. Recollection is another matter. Having something ‘on the tip of your tongue’ is a common phenomenon. What eventually brings it to mind? Synaptic association?

As artists we can to an extent train our minds. When I was first at art school there was a visual game. Walk into a room, spend five minutes, walk out and then draw it from any angle. How far was the chair from the cupboard? How many pictures were on the wall and how far apart? The same was true of a walk along a section of street. Did you remember the solitary leaf contained by a rectangle of pavement slab? Did you notice the dog? Did you hear the sound of dripping water? We challenged each other.

Then there was the life drawing studio. We spent days and weeks there training ourselves to see proportions, form and light but figurative work had gone out of fashion in spite of a major exhibition of the work of Kitaj and the ongoing fascination with Bacon’s popes which depart from their source, often replacing the pontiff’s head with the screaming face of the wounded nurse killed by soldiers’ gunfire on the Odessa steps sequence of Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin. Was this based an act of memory, of a mental impression? Bacon obsessively returned to this idea for over twenty years and various interpretations have been offered. What had he seen or experienced beyond reproductions of the Velasquez image of the pope in question [he never saw the original] or of having watched the film? One suggestion was of a traumatic childhood and dealing with his sexual orientation in the light of his militaristic and inflexible father. Direct retained experience surfaced via symbolic representation.

All artists in one way or another deal with memory. In the case of Claude Monet it was the moment between seeing and mixing the colour he was to apply. I don’t know how long that moment lasted but I imagine that it was short. He said that he was only an eye. What he meant was that only the immediate visual experience was relevant. Symbolism and Imagination played no part. In the case of Anselm Keiffer though, he was taking the detritus of decades in post war Germany and conflating them into massive constructions and paintings that reflected the physical and moral decay he saw around him.  His studios were filled with reclaimed concrete with its reinforcing wire, bricks and lead sheet – to build a life-sized war plane out of lead sheet took time but he wasn’t following a plan so much as the memory of what one looked like and the sense of menace it projected. These planes were never going to fly. They were reimagined constructions of a past that Keiffer may well not have experienced.

Transactive memory is interesting. We all accumulate memories but after a while you can longer be sure of either the validity of them or which part actually happened to you. We borrow the memories and observations of others who were there at the event and combine them with our own. This is transactive memory at work. The nett result is that the synaptic connections in your brain link together elements to give you a picture of being here until you can no longer tell the difference between direct experience and borrowed experience.

Transactive Memory is at work in my own paintings. Take ‘Don’t Spiegel Me Of Gluttony’ for example. I was there on the last day of the Adelaide Fringe in 2018 when a man in a kilt climbed to the top of a ladder and promised the ever-growing crowd that he was going to do something spectacular. In the time that I was there all he did was talk. What was the crowd expecting? Entertainment, revelation, understanding, bafflement? Perhaps all of those and none of them. For me it was anticipation and everything I saw and experienced that afternoon led to the same point as I walked the length of tents aware that Gluttony is a place of constructed fantasies. I didn’t go into any of them but outside on East Terrace were the action posters of the various acts that I pasted onto my memories of the tents as though I’d seen the acts themselves. I came away describing the man up the ladder as a Scotsman but I don’t remember his accent at all or any of the words. I remember the kilt. A construct? Probably. Others in the crowd may not even recall that So, what was I painting in the end? I was there. I was aware of a man up a ladder. I was aware of the crowd, but the painting is only marginally about that experience. He became a symbol of a wider imagined experience of the Fringe.

‘Hira Hira’ is not based on any memory of mine nor of my observation. The plane accident took place half a world away in 1985 and the reporting of it passed through so many pairs of hands that by the time I read about it, it was no longer memory but fantasy. 500 people died. What I saw was an official holding what remained of the tail with the JAL flight 123 and the colours in stripes. What I read was a transcription of a translation which sought to express not the deaths of so many people but the joke the press could make of it. ‘Before they could honour their dead, they joined them.’ This was a flight to the Bon Festival, the celebration of ancestors. The dominant images from the written article in a Sunday supplement came from oxygen masks falling like leaves, Hira Hira in Japanese. A man-made disaster had been filtered through memories of Autumn. I read about the pilot whose last words were recorded as ‘this is the end’ before the plane slammed into a mountain. I didn’t read those words until last week. The recorded words I read were ‘and now uncontrol’ but no remaining article contains them. Did I make them up? Did some journalist invent them? Wherever I got them from they are now part of my transactive memory.

‘Time and Tide’ is somewhat different but it is still transactive memory at work. I have called my father every week or so for much of my life. He lives in England and I’ve seen him only four times in 50 years. He has seldom ever asked what I do and conversations, such as they are, are limited to his problems and the weather. Information about his life comes from my sister who dutifully calls him every night. Did we ever talk about time or tides or even the Cutty Sark moored on the Thames. I can’t be sure.