Having spent a good part of the afternoon sorting through old photographs I can only describe my state of mind as “melancholy”. This is not the same by any means, of course, as “sadness”. Perhaps I am remembered by people whose names I can no longer recall. Places I will never visit again, in all probability, are etched into my memory, and have become a part of the foundations of who I am today. The person whom I regard in these pictures, although I am assured that it is “me”, I encounter today as a stranger. Only now, through these pictures, am I able to appreciate why once I loved somebody who is now distant from me.
There must be some way in which this experience, intense as it is, can find its expression in art. Perhaps my recent experiments with portraiture might offer a point of departure in this respect.