I had been really inspired by seeing the old masters in Europe on our recent trip there, for our fortieth birthday blowout when I had a show in Brussels, and we did part of the great tour with all the great museums. A most special highlight was the Rembrandt/Caravaggio show at the Van Gogh Museum. I realized that in micromanaged moments, they were able to have Cézanne-esque (or Van Gogh!) abstractions coming through their unconscious gestures along with conscious ones, and I began creating tighter, more worked-upon paintings that I continue to do today. This is the first painting of that series, created after just coming back from staying at the Proust Room at the Ritz (where I created paintings for the Whitney Biennial and beyond).

Proust is an important figure for me, as not only was he a gay man who revolutionized literature, but also as his famous work In Search of Lost Time was the older translated version of the title) begins as he bites into a madeleine, and the synesthetic, sensory effect is to send him to memories of his past, which he depicts through fragmented scenes, much as I use photos as talismans for memories and feelings and how my shows are nonlinear narratives composed of images.

I listened to the entire Remembrance (abridged! On audio CD—still about ninety CDs, with the old title I still like, In Remembrance of Things Past!), and music he loved while painting this work.

In Remembrance, a famous art critic has dies after seeing Vermeer’s View of Delft, overcome with the sublime experience of seeing the painting for the first time. This is from a black-and-white photo of Proust (painted to his actual height), after he himself had viewed the Vermeer, and who then died soon afterward—art imitating life.