My recent work is the outcome of a meditation on the paintings of the late Quebecois regionalist, Jean Paul Lemieux. Save for a few stints in California and France, Lemieux lived and died in Quebec. Although he does not freely admit it, his work is embedded in the landscape of his home. He wrote: “I try to express the solitude we all have to live with, and in each painting, the inner world of my memories. My external surroundings only interest me because they allow me to paint my inner world."
I traveled to Quebec to see his large-scale landscapes in person. I was surprised to find them first outside the museum walls. I recognized his illuminated grays and cold browns. I noticed the movement of his anemic sun barely burning through the clouds of the Quebec skyline. I admired the solitary horizon I’d already visited in “Rider in the Snow”. I believe Lemieux’s casual dismissal of his origins comes from his well-established connection to them. The fruit of this relationship are the ghostly nostalgic landscapes that I can almost inhabit. Lemieux brings me into a world so vast and quiet it teeters on the edge of total abstraction. I am nowhere in particular, and I can practically hear the snow falling.
Due to war, famine, and antisemitism, each of the last five generations of family originated in a new country. My sister and I are the lineage carriers, the offspring of Soviet Jewish refugees, and the first to grow up in the promised land of America. My conversations with Lemieux’s muted regional expressionism led to the creation of diasporic landscapes as loud and brash as my family’s dinner table. If a homeland can be a kind of inheritance, what is the inheritance that comes from a series of hasty migrations? My paintings answer in a visual language that is decidedly radioactive and other-worldly. They convey a moment of encounter with the unknown. Vistas of the new world await, but first, the viewer is met with an obstacle in the foreground. Unwieldy and large natural forms, a foaming sea, these are elements that speak to the impossibility of migration.
Unlike Lemieux, these moments of encounter with a new world are far from quiet, they speak through bold Slavic blues, reds, and phalo greens. These places momentarily invite the viewer, but rarely invite them to stay. They require translation. The figuration mirrors nature but defies what we know of it. The mind in diaspora is in a state of agitated misunderstanding and revelation, always attempting to know its surroundings in a jumble of references. The forms I paint, through reminiscent of nature, do not inspire confidence or nostalgia. Many times, Lemieux invited me into a simplified horizontal plain, a symbol of possibility, in which to explore his inner world. I relished each visit. My response was to look for that same plain. I found it in moments of migration and the hope for a new land.