Heilmann / Corbin

I like to think inside the green of their respective pasts:

“Each of my paintings can be seen as an autobiographical marker, a cue, by which I evoke a moment from my past, or my projected future, each a charm to conjure a mental reality and to give it physical form.” – Mary Heilmann

“Life and death are attributes of the soul, not of present or past things. The question is, rather, to understand what once made the past possible, caused its advent, was its future. To reapprehend this “possible” is to apprehend whether this past still has a future or not; here, precisely, one must not yield to the illusion that the decision is imposed by things.”

[…]

“To ‘decipher’ it is not to accumulate a vain erudition of things, but to open our own possibility to ourselves. The dilemma stated above has an exit. One cannot free oneself from the past without freeing that past itself; but to free it is to give it a future again, to make it significant” – Henry Corbin