Reading Proust in the studio
What involuntary memory has to do with how we look at paintings.
The madeleine is famous, but the mechanism is not: a taste, a texture, a particular slant of afternoon light, and the ordered present gives way to something older and more exact. Paintings work on us the same way — before interpretation, before language, a surface simply remembers us.
This essay follows one painter into the studio to watch that remembering happen in real time.