There are times when you have a plan that's so clear, you can almost see its entire shape before you. It was like that with my latest project, Perpetual — a series I felt ready to dive into and start creating. But then, without warning, something struck me, and I found myself on a different route. Temporarily, at least.
That “something” was Songs of a Lost World, the new album by The Cure. A soundscape so haunting and expansive, it felt like a necessary detour. Some works of art are too powerful to ignore, too intimate to resist. And Songs of a Lost World is exactly that — an invitation to hang out in a place where you might have felt alone before. A space that echoes with the sound of the lost, the haunted, and the yet-to-be-found.
Songs of a Lost World resonates with the sense of longing and reckoning that’s both personal and universal which I am too trying to create in my work. It’s as though the music speaks to the parts of us we can’t always articulate, pulling us into landscapes marked by shadowed memories and half-remembered dreams. The Cure doesn’t create a world to escape to — they create a world you just find yourself within. And I thought, why not follow this impulse? Why not let the music guide what I am creating for a while?
And so, for now, I’m working on a new series, small squares, each one a visual reflection of a track, a mood, a hint of memory evoked by Songs of a Lost World. In these squares, I’m exploring fragments: shapes that hint at whole forms but remain elusive, textures that evoke echoes rather than solidity. Each piece becomes a fragment of the “lost world”—a world where we all wander, gathering meaning from impressions, a world of hidden corners and whispered thoughts. Filled in with my own mind, places both strange and familiar.
The Cure’s music invites us to a melancholic joy, a feeling of finding beauty not in resolution but in the searching itself. It’s in the cracks, the fractures, the colors we only notice in the dim light. For this series, I want to use that very language, the language of what’s fleeting and half-seen. As if I was chasing echoes of their songs, to capture what’s always on the verge of vanishing.
And yet, beneath all that melancholy, there’s always optimism too. Because even if the world we create — whether in music or on a wooden panel, is a place of longing, it’s still a place we can share. In those sounds, those colors, in every piece of the lost world we find together, we recognize something of ourselves. Songs of a Lost World reminded me of the beauty in shifting paths, in welcoming inspiration even when it disrupts, and of how art connects us, even when it comes from a place of loneliness.
So, for now, the Perpetual series has to wait. I’ve turned to something else, something unexpected but simply alive. This series of squares will become my soundtrack that feels like coming home, even if home is a place we’re still searching for.
For now, I’m listening, painting, and drifting into the lost world, where we are all, in our own ways, found.
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