When I was about eleven years old, I wrote a poem (in pentameter no less) about how I die, and meet God, and he asks me whether I believed in him while alive. I briefly answer that I had my doubts (doing my best to be polite), and without missing a beat, proceed to barrage him with a series of questions about the paradoxes and glaring inconsistencies I had observed in the world by that time. I never completed the poem, because I couldn’t come up with any interesting answers on God’s behalf. 

This insatiable urge to comprehend everything never subsided. In the deepest sense, my life has always been a quest for quintessence of all there is, but the nature of this quest changed dramatically over time. 

It began as an adventure of the mind. It seemed so obvious in the beginning that the mind is the best tool we humans have to understand how the universe works. I spent the first half of my work life as a linguist; nothing gives you a better opportunity to witness the mind’s limitations — and it’s puppy-like love of chasing its own tail — than observing how languages actually work. This made my quest seem more hopeless than ever.

When I returned to my childhood dream of painting, it felt — for a while — that I’ve found some answers in the sheer power of presence and aliveness that comes from the practice of painting. Painting from life is a practice of engagement with reality that easily transcends the limitations of mind and language. To use William Blake’s famous words, it cleanses the doors of perception and opens you to reality beyond all paradoxes, hidden behind the veil created by the mind with its urge to give name to everything and to judge what’s right and what’s wrong. 

Painting became my path of insight and freedom.

In 2011, this path led me to the (still ongoing) “Sonnets in colour” series, which seeks to translate all 154 Shakespeare’s sonnets into the language of painting. I had very little understanding of what it is I am doing, and how this translation might look like — what is going to be lost, and, perhaps more importantly, what will be found in this translation. I just had a vague feeling that there is a space where there is no difference between painting and poetry, where they are still one, and I wanted to find and explore this space. In retrospect, I realize I was longing to bring the two halves of my life back together, to find a new synthesis — and maybe, just maybe, even synergy between them. 

But the reality that has been opening to me through this process is more wonderful, beautiful and meaningful than I could have imagined in my wildest dreams. It is a field of ever-present resonant synergy between all of Art, across time, space, and art forms. Ultimately, it is a field of love that is (as Tagor put it) the heart of existence itself.