The Unbearable Lightness of Being
2025
Jasper Johns once wrote that he strove to “make the helpless statement”. Perhaps he is whispering over my shoulder. Painting can be an affirmation or an exorcism; in this case, it embodies both. I spend my days trying to make sense of the ineffable— though perhaps it’s best to simply release the images and the shadow they cast. It is an act of forgetting, it is an act of refusing to let go. The most tremendous beauty and greatest tragedy I have ever known flung me to the outskirts of myself and begged me to come back home. I am no longer afraid of being sentimental when I say that painting is entirely about love, and loss. There isn’t anything else. Memory and the persistence of beauty are all that remain.
