Today’s watercolor experiment:

This is the third watercolor study in my ‘brain series’. (Previous studies: Compartmentalization and Brain Teasers.)

Memories Fade
9″x12″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block

I began by taking my pencil point for a walk (thank you, Paul Klee, for that metaphor). I made a continuous line beginning at the upper right side of the picture plane, stylizing the contours of half the brain’s surface, rounding the bottom repeating the sequence in reverse on the left side and ending at the division between the two halves of the brain.

The brain attends to a number of sensory inputs. In the case of this sketch, I concentrated on the visual sense. Interesting point: The eye is actually formed from brain tissue, so the visual element of the eye embedded in one of the folds of the brain has some basis in fact.

I brought the colors of the spectrum in from the outside world and transmitted them through streamer-like tendrils, to a spiral element.  The planar spiral represents a spiral-like structure in the brain called the hippocampus, active in the mechanism of memory.

On the other side of the brain, I replicated this structure (which is indeed the case in the actual brain). Instead of the colors of the spectrum, I painted the tendrils as sepia-toned. To me, sepia represents the past. Old photographs are often sepia-toned or faded in some manner.

There you have it. A representation of fading memory through stylized icons of brain parts.