Organic Memories from Childhood: Abstraction of Innocence

Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Size: 4ft x 4ft
Creation Date: 2020

Organic Memories from Childhood (2020) is a 48 x 48 inch acrylic painting from my Playful Abstraction Collection. This piece is an open-ended invitation to step into the tactile, emotional, and imaginative landscapes that linger from early life — those sensations and impressions that persist not as images, but as color, shape, and movement embedded in the body.

The painting is filled with bulbous, soft-edged forms that feel as if they’ve grown organically rather than been placed. Their irregularity — loose, wobbly, unbalanced — becomes a visual echo of childhood itself: raw, exuberant, sometimes awkward, but always alive. The palette is vibrant yet gentle, with glowing pinks, leafy greens, and buttery yellows blending and jostling across the canvas. There’s a lightness here, a pulse of joy that resists overthinking.

When I began this piece, I wasn’t seeking to recall specific memories. Instead, I was reaching for the feeling of being young — of seeing the world without expectation, without the pressure to make sense of it all. The result is a kind of visual playroom: open-ended, expressive, a bit chaotic, and entirely welcoming.

This painting draws from the whimsical lineage of Joan Miró, whose abstract works embraced absurdity, motion, and the spontaneity of mark-making. Like Miró, I’m interested in abstraction as a portal to freedom — not just aesthetic freedom, but emotional and psychological release. The childlike here is not a retreat into naivety, but a reclaiming of wonder and intuition.

Organic Memories from Childhood asks the viewer to slow down and soften — to approach the painting not with analysis, but with presence. It’s an invitation to reconnect with the forgotten textures of early life, and to find meaning in the playful, imperfect, and beautifully unresolved.