LIFE AS WE KNOW IT
A girl boards a ship bound for a new life in Paris.
She is 19. Navigating the crowds on board the liner, she looks for a space on the rail to wave goodbye as one does on the threshold of adventure. Gazing out over the harbor, she imagines a bohemian life, a walk-up near Montmartre, casual drinks in a sidewalk cafe before dinner, a sunrise photoshoot at the Medici Fountain, a romantic walk along the Seine. She will be a model. A trusted girlfriend. A lover. A woman in Paris.
A flash of doubt strikes the woman left on the pier. She has chosen another life. She has married a man who returned from the war in France, a man who sailed back over this same ocean, burdened with many secrets. With a child in her arms, she has set the course of her life. And in that next moment — in that next instant as fleeting as a synapse — her doubt disappears and her confidence returns.
Seeing all of life in a single moment.
The great illusion of your life is that it is a video streaming 24/7 from the moment you are born until the moment you die. You wake and sleep, tune in and tune out, as the stream goes on. When you’re young, you can hardly look away. You turn up the volume and agonize after the cliffhanger ending of each episode. When you are older, surprises come less and less often — and occasionally you wish you could just click a button and switch to some other channel.
But what happens when you click PAUSE, stop the stream, freeze the frame, and look closely? In this moment you can see the depth of all human emotion and the expanse of every human life.
I cannot look away from this.
A boy, innocent and kind, is given a uniform and a commission, and sent to war. In moments like this one in a camp in Germany in 1945, what he sees changes everything. Certainly his future changes. In fact, his whole outlook on life changes, along with both his future and his past. In this moment, nothing remains untouched. And everything that comes afterward is explained.
This is why I paint.
A single frame in the stream of someone’s life — captured, deciphered and amplified with charcoal or paint on a canvas — can explain many of the unsolved mysteries of my life.
And yours.