Three Stages of the Drawing

Mounting the show "Paradise", Proteus Gowanus, New York

Counting the Days (Impossibility of Paradise)

The place illustrated is a real place, the Tbilisi Botanical Gardens, drawn from a photograph taken 100 years ago. I am fascinated by the remoteness of this image in time, which asks me to decide: what is my relationship to the garden and to the image? The image was caught long before I was born, and the garden has existed for centuries before that. But I am there several times a year, watching the changes in the garden and its surroundings. This place also holds the quality of Paradise: it inspires the feverish emotions that accompany the scoring of the passage of time – time to arrive, time spent, time left.

Living here and thinking about “there” is sometimes an exhausting imposition of geography, and it was in a moment that I painted the black shadow, which gave me some relief – but then my eyes began to construct the image again, and I found myself involved in rebuilding the myth of a paradise impossible to achieve.

The Book of Gardens