Memory of Childhood 1950

Will Barnet made this work ‘Memory of Childhood’ with crayon or charcoal. The tone is soft, a little smudgy, like a half-erased blackboard. It makes me think of a dream, something remembered but not fully grasped. You can feel Barnet’s hand moving across the paper, making these marks that build up into figures and trees. He uses a lot of hatching, crisscrossing lines, like he's building a little world with his pencil, or maybe he is trying to trap something. I wonder what he was thinking about as he made it? Perhaps childhood isn't all sunshine and rainbows; maybe there's a bit of melancholy there, or a sense of mystery. Like you are trying to conjure a ghost. I think it is about a haunting, a memory refusing to let go. Looking at this reminds me of other artists, like Marsden Hartley, who also played with memory and form. Artists are always talking to each other, you know, across time and space.