(Interestingly, my encounter in two stages with “la Recherche,” first through its title and then only many years afterwards through actually reading it, resonates with one of the main themes developed throughout the novel. The standard English translation of the title, on the other hand, is unfortunately far less successful: “In Search of Lost Time” retains none of the poetic rhythm of the original, and also somehow fails to replicate the poignant sense of irretrievableness evoked by “perdu.” This probably explains why Proust’s novel was first translated into English with the less literal and in its own way admirably straightforward title of “Remembrance of Things Past.” I’m fairly sure that the first time I heard the title as a child, it was in its Italian translation, “Alla ricerca del tempo perduto.” This literal transposition is, to my ears, perhaps even more beautiful than the original (This may have to do with the fact that the translated title constitutes a hendecasyllable, the principle meter of Italian poetry). And then there is just some intangible mystery and incantatory magic conjured up by those few words that I would need Proust’s attunement to the subtlest shades of aesthetic and emotional experience to properly put my finger on. And yet, it is so simple, so seemingly straightforward (even as it subtly plays on the double meaning of “temps perdu” as “wasted time” or as “time gone forever,” as well as, perhaps, on a double meaning for “recherche,” as a spiritual quest and as a kind of methodical investigation). I have always found “À la recherche du temps perdu” to be one of the most evocative, musical, and poetical phrases imaginable. The greatest novel of the twentieth century may very well have the best title as well. Long before I braved the first line of its first volume, however, Proust’s novel cycle had already won me over to its unquestionable greatness through the words that the reader encounters even before the first chapter: Those of its title. Four completed volumes in, I feel this is an assessment I could definitely see myself subscribing to. Marcel Proust’s seven-volume magnum opus, À la recherche du temps perdu, is often cited as the greatest novel of the twentieth century. The composition is largely taken from a painting of Nachi Falls in Japan by an artist of the Kamakura period (1185-1333, so perhaps from the Japanese trecento?). Not all of the inspiration for this image comes from the Italian Proto-Renaissance.
But it was fun to do, and a good way to observe those stylistic elements more closely.
On the contrary, as a shabby imitation of the genuine article, it likely holds the potential to revolt me even more than my other efforts. That is not to say that this work is likely to nauseate me any less the next time I catch a stomach flu. This painting is a kind of tribute to a few of my favourite stylistic elements from those trecento and quattrocento masters. These are the artists I was most drawn to when I was a boy, and their frescos constitute perhaps a kind of visual “comfort food.” There is also to these paintings something elemental, unadorned, and supernaturally sincere that will always be restorative (“unadorned” should perhaps be qualified, given the abundance of gold leaf backgrounds and detailing, but even these seem to carry a note of honest materiality). The exception to this illness-induced artistic intolerance, the visual equivalent of those crackers or rice, is for me the art of the so-called Italian “Primitives”–the Sienese and Florentine masters of the fourteenth and early fifteenth century. And if I were to actually cast eyes on them, the unmitigated revulsion would probably lead me to give up on art completely. As for my own works, which I invariably find vaguely disappointing at the best of times, I mostly know better to even think of them when I am ill, so sickening they are to me. Even many of the artists that I normally admire most–your Botticellis, Watteaus, or Max Ernsts–will set my head swimming and stomach churning. No matter what I’m looking at, all I see is garish, contrived, and pointless dreck. When I’m feeling sick with a stomach flu or something like that, almost all visual art becomes suddenly nauseating to me. Often at these times there are only one or two things one can bring oneself to eat, such as maybe a few soda crackers or a bowl of white rice. It is a well-known phenomenon that, when one is feeling sick, all of the foods one normally finds delicious can come to seem entirely off-putting.