“Memory believes before knowing remembers”. (William Faulkner)

There has been a river in all I remember. Even my memories and reflections cannot hide behind anything. Their slow flow is both like a transparent piece of glass and a reflecting surface. How can the sky hide behind a river? And yet both are translucent.  At one point or even at many points the sky and the river are as one. Memories and reflections have a habit of becoming one and entangle in the living present. This becomes history. A man’s life is measured in terms of memory. Like the sea swallowing moving waters, time swallows every moving image. Like the tiny grass stem that resists gravity life always springs surprises. The rest is for us to complete.
Time and image emerge in blue. Red is the garnishing of life, the passions of the soul. Yellow is never death, but the desire for growth; purple and lilac are the very nerve centres of sky and sea, and blue is unending like life itself.
As every artist knows, the space of creation is an encounter with white and black, the prefiguring of the emerging experience, the grappling of silence and the soul. What remains till the very end is the wonder of creation, all creation. Nothing is terminated. Everything is a continuation. Forms and lines, blanks and swells, splashes and drips, the spread of slow colour. Why should any art attempt at an explanation? Isn’t all art tentative in itself?  Like life.
For me every landscape is an incomplete project of eternity.  I used to work outdoors and sketch from life.  Sometimes I withdraw and let the line takeover. After all, there are no lines in nature, no forms, no colour.  All are what we sense. It is we who bring forms into being, we attribute time and spatial being, we create dimension and desire. 
Rivers of Memory is my fourteenth solo exhibition.  These works are done in acrylic and oils. The canvas has been treated by the elements over slow time.

MURALI SIVARAMKRISHNAN​

RIVERS OF MEMORY Gallery Square Circle, Kala Kendra, Bharat Nivas, Auroville, 23rd January -3rd February 2011