Katrine Claassens. Summer Garden or Between The Interia and The Swimming Pools. Oil and pencil on li

Nostalgia is always a sort of phantom pain for a past that was never there, and childhood has always felt more idyllic than it was, an innocence that was never really present, or present – at any rate – only in the consciousness of its loss. To look at this pastat all honestly is to face the challenge of simultaneously giving a true account of the wonder felt at the time, and to wonder at it now with the experience of hindsight; it is to try and recapture an image which melts away even as it is being composed, which is already shifting even as the paint is drying on the canvas.