I have seen this painting before

[smokingboot]

It isn't deja vu; I remember seeing it and trying to copy it from memory when I was a girl. I only saw it once and never again until right now when it appeared on my FB feed in full glory, title and name supplied: Mystery and Melancholy of a Street by Giorgio De Chirico.




I never knew the name of this piece, nor anything about it, but the image haunted me for a long time alongside a couple of others easier to trace. This painting, this yellow road right here is a place I can understand and almost recognise as a suburb of Carcosa. This is where Cassilda sent her daughter when she finally understood the Yellow King. I remember yellow light and roads of yellow dust mixed with that light, Singapore, Spain, brilliant beautiful years before I could speak. But I am not caught in some allegory of my past made up in a half dream. For once I can be definitive; I saw this landscape long ago, only once, but I remembered it and tried to recreate it. My moment in the kitchen is as real a memory as my sight of the painting.

But when did I see it? Impossible before I was seven, when there was neither school nor TV around. And afterwards I don't recall watching art programmes at the time even assuming they existed and interested my parents. I never saw this at home, never learned of it in school, so where do I know it from? And when did I try to make my own version of it?

Maybe the painting I need to create is one of me sitting at our old kitchen table trying to reproduce the above. Or if I really want to be clever, a portrait of now me trying to paint a picture of then me trying to reproduce Mystery and Melancholy of a Street . If that doesn't get me on Portrait Artist of the Year, I'll hand back my pseud's membership card.

Meanwhile, I am getting over having another tooth out (eh, they did warn me re the radiotherapy) fortunately the damage is mostly at the back. I have spent days on a combo of bloody powerful painkillers, wandering around the house like a stoned elephant. It is, in fact, the perfect point at which to bump into a painting I know, like an old friend who's crazy-lucid but tells great stories all the while insisting they are true.