Why Certain Places Stay With Us: Painting Memory, Not Place

Why do certain places stay etched in our memory?

I remember walking through Menton on a hundred-degree day, seeking shade in its meandering staircases and maze of winding streets. The heat was oppressive, the kind that makes you search for every sliver of shadow between buildings.

And then we descended onto the beach and looked back at the city from down below.

A mirage.

It didn’t seem like something built by human hands. This sprawling chessboard of colors and shapes ascending the mountain. Ochres, pinks, yellows and terracottas stacked one upon another, somehow climbing upward without fighting the landscape beneath them.

You have no choice but to marvel at the genius of thought that created this oasis to coexist with the terrain. It’s as if it’s one of those rare wonders of the world that has been kissed by God’s approval.

I’m not religious at all. But when tears come out of nowhere, carrying some inexplicable cocktail of emotions, it’s hard not to blame the divine.

Trying to translate awe

That’s what I’ve been trying to express throughout my whole career: that sensation of awe.

I think that, in some way, I’m constantly attempting to arrive at a perfect formula of shapes, colors and lines that could translate the divine.

But interestingly, the older I get, the less interested I am in depicting the actual details of a place.

Memory doesn’t work that way either. When I think back to Menton, I don’t remember individual windows or architectural details. I remember the pattern of the city climbing the mountain. I remember the intensity of the color against the water. I remember the heat. I remember looking up from the beach and feeling completely overwhelmed by what human beings had managed to build there. And I remember the feeling of being very small. That is what I want to paint.

Painting a memory instead of a photograph

In my paintings, some edges are purposefully melted down. Some elements remain golden, as if they are still being kissed by the sun. Buildings merge into one another. The mind-boggling number of layers only matters because of the patterns they create.

The literal place begins to disappear. What remains is the sensation of it.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve never been particularly interested in painting a faithful reproduction of a photograph. A photograph can already tell us exactly what something looked like. I’m much more interested in the question: What did it feel like to be there?

Which colors survived in your memory?

Which parts disappeared?

What did the light do?

What is it about that particular place that made you carry it with you years later?

Because the places that matter most to us rarely stay frozen as images. They become intertwined with the people we were when we encountered them, the people who were beside us, and everything that happened before and after.

Our search for beauty

There is another reason I keep returning to cities like Menton in my work. I’m fascinated by that meeting point between what nature created and what human beings dared to add to it.

A mountain exists. And over centuries, people build into it. They adapt to its inclines and limitations. They create stairs and passages, homes and churches, walls and windows. Generations disappear, but the marks they made remain. Eventually it becomes difficult to see where landscape ends and human intervention begins.

My paintings are an ode to that human ability to transcend—to persevere in our search for beauty across centuries.

Maybe that’s why certain places stay etched in our memory. They remind us that sometimes what human beings create can become so intertwined with nature, so improbably beautiful, that for a moment we can’t quite tell where human ingenuity ends and something greater begins.

What place lives in your heart?

Perhaps there is a place like that for you, too.

A landscape. A city. A childhood home. A view from a trip you still talk about years later. Somewhere that has become so intertwined with your own story that remembering the place means remembering a piece of yourself. This fall, I’m opening my studio to four commissioned paintings, to be completed in time for the holiday season.

I’m not interested in simply reproducing your photograph. I want to know what you remember about the place—its light, its colors, its atmosphere, and what it means to you—and translate that memory through my own language of layers, melted edges, color and gold.

If there is a place that lives in your heart, I’d love to paint it. Reach out!