on eternity and the unbearable lightness of being.
For a long time I’ve wanted to write, and often there was too much chaos—never the space to put anything down. Now I have the space, and, surprisingly, even the ideas. Around a decade ago I was in the grip of a kind of melancholic disorder, and I started to imagine a lineage among the minds I admired—for instance, Da Vinci to Shakespeare to Tarkovsky, among others. It felt like a through-line of spirit and a special kind of complexity in their work—although “complexity” is probably not the right word. It was a lineage of beauty, of ideas, of artistic philosophy.
More recently I’ve reconsidered this speculation. I believe it has more to do with meaning than anything else. For instance, what does the Mona Lisa mean? This isn’t new, but bear with me: she means everything and nothing. I believe Da Vinci spent years perfecting that woman’s face, making the slightest alterations until her expression held all emotions and none. Why does Hamlet not sweep to his revenge? Is he mad, incompetent, confused, or caught in a moral quarrel with himself? It is all of these—and others. Just as Da Vinci painstakingly crafted the Mona Lisa until the face meant everything and nothing, so too did Shakespeare shape Hamlet’s conscience into a riddle within a riddle within a riddle. And then Tarkovsky carried that inquiry into cinema.
And so we get to talk about Tarkovsky. What can you say about Tarkovsky? He knew history—of art and of the soul—deeply and personally. I’ve been obsessed with him for a decade; during my anxiety period I read his diary six times in a row. And I can say now that I don’t really know where he came from, but, of all the artists I’ve loved, I loved him the most.
What does Mirror mean? Everything. It is dreams; it is memory; it is longing. It is an attempt to say what cannot be said—to speak what can only be expressed through poetic association.
And so, when I look at these three, what I see is what I’ve come to call sfumato. I believe it is an artistic philosophy. It is the expansion of meaning to infinity; it is the blurring of boundaries until a piece means everything. It is Hamlet’s riddle within a riddle within a riddle. I believe they were expressing the same thing in different ways.
I remember reading that Tarkovsky regretted a single moment in Mirror—a scene in which the performer’s expression became too explicit, too legible. He wrote that he was furious because the face gave the answer away. And so I believe that Tarkovsky carried the sfumato mantle: there was to be nothing that could be neatly pointed at or directly identified. He was interested in the expression of eternity in everything, just as Shakespeare was, just as Da Vinci was. For him, any clearly identified expression went too far—too obvious. I believe he despised the obvious.
This is how I now approach painting. What I attempt to create are fields of resonance. I try, as best as possible, not to paint objects, Although form does occasionally creep in. What I am looking for is that resonant light that vibrates off the canvas. It is fiendishly difficult. I may never get there. But I am looking for eternity.
I believe we all want this. I believe we all need this . I believe that we need eternity. And without it, somehow, we are crushed beneath the unbearable lightness of being.