Reflections: Picture of a Place in Time
The memories a painting holds
On a wall in our bedroom hangs a little oil painting. About nine inches by thirteen and contained within a wooden, silver-painted frame, it shows the skyline of Oia, a little hilltop town on Santorini—the famously volcanic Greek island in the Aegean Sea. Almost everyone who visits Santorini ends up in Oia because the town—which clings to the cliffs on the northwestern tip of the island, a thousand sheer feet above the wine-dark sea—is probably the most spectacular place in the world from which to watch the sun set. In a blaze of blue and white and gold paint, piled on thick with a palette knife, the artist who made our little painting captured the gorgeous cascade of blue-roofed, whitewashed buildings that line the clifftop, through which a visitor picks his way on higgledy-piggledy footpaths festooned with sprays of red and purple bougainvillea, and lined with homes, shops, bars, restaurants, galleries, and the occasional landscape painter. Quite simply, Oia is the most breathtakingly beautiful place my wife and I have ever visited.
My wife and I didn’t buy this painting, though. We visited Santorini in 1993 before we were married, when we were just another couple of twenty-something backpackers drifting around Southern Europe with a dog-eared copy of Let’s Go Greece for guidance and a determination to make the few hundred bucks in our possession last as long as possible. In 1993 Greece was a good place to do that; the food and the ferries were cheap, the beach was free, and we were young and in love and sunburned and as good-looking as we were ever going to be. Being broke, though, whatever drachmas we had went towards bread and feta and ferry tickets, not oil paintings and other meaningful souvenirs of that precious, precious time—no matter how much I wish I could go back and change that now.
Our Oia painting was a gift from my wife’s sister, Becky, who went to Santorini herself a few years later, when she needed a break from medical school. I guess she got tired of hearing us rave about it and decided to see what the fuss was about. Somewhere along one of those clifftop footpaths Becky made the acquaintance of a landscape artist sitting by an easel set up to face the setting sun. She bought two paintings: one for herself and one for us. When she came home and gave it to us, we agreed that we’d all go back together one day.
How long ago that seems. Today Becky is in the home stretch of a battle with cancer—a slow-spreading lymphoma that lurked undetected for a year or more before surfacing to steal her health and challenge her spirit. And for Ashley and I, plodding through the heavily mortgaged hills and valleys of middle age, that summer in Greece seems impossibly distant across space as well as time—a shimmering fever dream seen through blue, white and gold-tinted glasses. A couple of days ago I glanced at that little painting and realized I hadn’t actually thought about our time in Santorini in years. Doing so now brought all sorts of memories rushing back: Ashley and me on a rented motorbike, swooping down the hilltop road between Oia and Fira amid a flock of other scooters—her blonde hair streaming in the wind. The two of us waking up beneath a thin blanket, on a beach in the chill light of dawn and watching a single, wooden fishing boat puttering out to sea. A rooftop bar in early evening, beers and a backgammon game, and the light of a setting sun making a flaming halo of my future wife’s hair. Are these memories real? Besides a couple of faded snapshots taken with a disposable camera (remember those?), there’s very little material evidence from that summer to go by. So whether things happened the way I remember is hard to say. But it scarcely seems to matter because all these memories and more seem to be bottled up in that little painting—better than a photograph, truer than the truth—waiting for somebody to stop for a second and take the time to remember. A nine-by-thirteen reminder of life’s infinite possibility, the value of experience over material gain, and the inescapability of time. Together with Becky, we will go back. And when we do, the sun will still be setting over Oia.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher