As I’ve looked on internet for inspiration and for visual reference material for my paintings, it’s dawned on me that while my paintings may be characterized as nostalgic, the subject of them is never nostalgia itself. Some paintings out there do take nostalgia as the subject. I’ve seen them in art magazines and on the internet. They are like an elbow to the rib by a guy saying, “Hey bud, remember when things were like this?” They are the equivalent of canned laugh tracks or worse, explained jokes. Just as such explanations kill humor, these images actually kill nostalgia by distancing the viewer from the very things depicted. There is a wink involved somewhere in the proceedings, as if the artist wouldn’t have been able to bear actual pangs of nostalgia.

So if that’s not what I’m after in paintings, then what?

I’m primarily after a certain aesthetic. I will illustrate by saying that while many objects sounds and images from the 1970’s might fill me with nostalgia, I don’t have any plans to do any paintings set in that era. While I’m not repulsed by the aesthetic of the time as some are, I’m not that drawn to it.

Now, at the other end of the spectrum from the nostalgia-mongers, there are those who are against nostalgia, and in some cases it’s a moral-sounding stance. This I don’t understand.

I’ve heard the following charge made against nostalgia many a time— and perhaps you have too: the good old days were never that good.

It reminds me of an article I came across as a youth. I forget where, but the purpose of it was to dissuade young men from looking at a certain kind of magazine. While there are good arguments against said magazines, the author chose a rather weak one for his purpose— one that could hardly have had the desired effect, namely that there’s a certain amount of fakery involved in the photography to be found in such publications. Talk about missing the point.

In the same way, to say the good old days were never so good misses the point. 

Now I’m not speaking in favor of living in the past like Miss Havisham or Uncle Rico. I’m talking about mindfulness of that which is pleasant in life— the attention to that which is good and beautiful and noble— whatever the time period in which it exists or existed.

If nostalgia’s nay-sayers are to be consistent, then they need to apply their rigorous standards of truth to the present too. I can just see such a one on a date. The woman says, “I’m having such a good time talking to you.” The man replies, “You’re not having as good a time as you think you are. Might I point out the great misery there is in the world? Let me proceed with a long list for the next three hours.”

But apart from this, there’s a faulty assumption in the charge about the good old days. It’s the idea that nostalgia is, per se, about the good old days. It really isn’t.

I think here of Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. In the course of the novel he finds that some things and people aren’t as great as he’d thought. There’s a great deal of phoniness in the world. Yet, in the end, he’s still capable of nostalgia. It’s not just for the good things. His nostalgia includes even “old Stradlater and Ackley”, his prep school nemeses.

Nostalgia, I believe, is really about the intangibles— the sense of being fully alive, the bits of light that come in through the chinks in the darkness, the realization that even in the mundane there is something of value. It’s the stuff Emily Webb discovers in the play Our Town, the things we miss when we’re in the midst of the day-to-day, and then miss— in another sense— when we look back.

I’m too lazy to look it up right now, but I’ve heard of a study that shows that when elderly men are immersed in nostalgia— the things of their youth-- for several days, they become physically stronger and healthier.   

Not that I’m painting nostalgia. I’m painting what’s behind the nostalgia— the unfulfillable.