As a child, I grew up with this landscape above my bed. It was painted by my mother around the time she was my age, and has always reminded me of home. Throughout all of the places I’ve lived, this canvas and its familiar colours have traveled with me as a companion and guide. Sometimes words, like paintings, descend into your mind while you’re sleeping, and slowly decay in you for years—creating phrases that tattoo your mind with confusion. Later in life, once you’ve forgotten them, they appear again to offer an explanation. Safe Passage is a phrase that came into my life at an early age, like this landscape. I would say it aloud in my head without knowing its meaning—feeling an unwanted connection to something I didn’t understand.

To me it always suggested a farewell, or a peace offering for those who needed protection. Sometimes life happens faster than it should, and you make plans with expectations of certainties that don’t always come true; and gradually you forget the words that once comforted you. Then later on, at exactly the right moment, they happen to reappear and define themselves.

It’s unsettling how life begins and ends in a place as vulgar as a hospital bed. From my birth, my mother sculpted my life with unconditional love and wisdom— then suddenly, just as I had appeared in her arms, she passed away in mine. As I lay next to her on the bed, her body wrapped in machinery, I played this music again and again for her as she let go of her last breath.

Thus, a record originally conceived as a celebration of life redefined itself as the score to my mother’s death. The title Safe Passage finally tattooed itself into me, and offered me an explanation.

Thousands of miles away, and over hours of conversation, Frits Wentink composed hundreds of musical sketches that I aligned into these three movements. As the months evaporated, Safe Passage never seemed to have a conclusion, but continuously cycled into different fragments— mimicking our new world, ravaged by the disease that had strangled the music from my mother’s breath.

The most difficult part of losing someone you love is continuing to hear their voice inside your head. Each time I re-listen to this music, I hear my mom’s voice, and see her soul leaving her body in that horrible little bed. After I left the hospital, numb, I visited her apartment to collect what was left behind, and stumbled upon a bookshelf of poetry I’d read in my youth. As I opened each book, I fixated on the circled passages I had marked years ago, seeing each sentence for the first time. Over the following weeks I started to rearrange the isolated passages into new verses of my own—believing the words I’d circled in my past had been waiting to be rearranged into a new story, just as I had approached art as a child—drawing circles and filling them in with colour.

Arrangements of words, colours, and music have always paralyzed me. I often stop halfway through a text or song, and find myself caught in a maze of colour that inevitably looks like the landscape that once hung over my bed. I now realise, as an adult, that this gesture has always defined how I’ve created—transforming fragments of things I’ve seen before into new poetry.

For an artist, the most difficult task is to realise what it is that you actually do, and to try to understand why. The poems I wrote for this album, the paintings I made for this book, and the photographs I’ve been making all of my life are merely circles drawn around fragments I’ve remembered. Two decades before this project began, my mom gifted me a copy of Albert Camus’s The Fall.

The first time I reopened the book, I was sunk deep in an airport armchair in Amsterdam—the town where Camus’s story takes place—and I found myself paralysed by certain lines that I had circled years before.

I believe to understand is to face the impossible. It is to re-examine all that you’ve seen before, now—hoping you will uncover a new truth, while knowing you can never return to that first place again. Through this paradox, we may stumble upon enlightenment.

I am often confounded by words and art when I revisit them. When I look at old paintings, or re-listen to music, I often believe I could improve upon them. Art is a continuum that is both objectively good and bad; the more you see, the more you create distinctions, as a child comes to understand that tomatoes are delicious after protesting them for years—even while enjoying ketchup and pizza. Have I been enjoying truth this whole time, but only now understand what it tastes like when it isn’t hidden behind a veneer?

It’s hard to remember being in an airport now that it’s been almost a year since I’ve left my house. I used to spend most of my time in airports, going to and from cities and back home again. Now I just stare into the forest— either sleeping twelve hours at a time, or lying awake all night avoiding sleep altogether. I remember hating waiting: waiting in airports and taxis, waiting for someone to meet me in a city I was passing through. Now I’m waiting for life to let me return to waiting—I’m waiting to wait again. We’ve all been yelling into the abyss for this year to be over, while looking back at a world that’s left us behind. We don’t understand what happened, but we know we can’t return—so we pretend we don’t know that, the only truth we do know. Is this something like what Camus was getting at in The Fall?

When I return to the paintings I remember from my childhood, I notice details I never saw before. I see them for the first time—in their whole being, instead of mere brushstrokes and colour. How much we ignore when we live in our heads. Memories from my life before, from last year, from years before that, and the years before those… I can agree that many of those occasions horrify me now, mostly because we never truly appreciate the moment. What a horribly boring and obvious thing to say.

There’s no fun in truth; it only leads to pain. That’s why we tell ourselves stories, paint pictures, listen to music, and lie to ourselves—pretending we won’t die, or that we’ll be better. As Camus said, “we are wretched creatures.”

But I also don’t believe that, or would rather not believe it. I’d rather believe we just want to be loved. And so we arrive here.

The love I have for creating art began in my early childhood. After work my mother would come home and we’d spend hours painting with watercolours on our old basement table—a 1950s half-sized bar that was taller than me. It had a horrible yellow plastic top with a fake wood lacquer, and it separated the TV area from the haunted closets behind it, which were full of Christmas decorations and other discarded objects. I disliked our basement immensely, because it made me see that we were actually poor compared to my friends—a fact which wouldn’t have bothered me so much, but I felt my mother deserved better.

The light above the bar was a dull, dimmed yellow that never quite showed you anything; it simply made whatever you were looking at slightly uglier. This, perhaps, is why to this day I despise the colour yellow. As a colour, it may only be forgiven when it appears in nature. Otherwise, yellow is a disruption to our senses.

The street behind my parents’ first house was riddled with cracked sidewalks: a horrible street to learn how to ride a bike on. It was around my birthday in the beginning of September when my grandparents first helped me learn. I was wearing a damp wool jacket that matched the wetness of the leaves under my tires. I could almost taste the ochres, yellows, and blood-red of the dead leaves that transformed the pavement into a canvas. That was a comforting kind of yellow—a colour that suggested warmth to my shivering. It was the same colour I later encountered each fall as I left my parents for university, far away. And now, it remains my least favourite colour.

In re-reading Camus’s words I could distinctly visualise parts of Amsterdam that I had actually walked through before —but it was unsettling to imagine my mind’s recollection being redrawn by someone else.

To read it again was to re-experience it through new eyes while still seeing it as it appeared in my past, like a double exposure. I think that’s what my work ultimately is: double exposures, or conversations between artists across time that layer memories on top of each other, and add to the continuum.

Tonight before bed, my son Felix told me he sees his dreams on the walls and ceiling. He asked me if I could see them too, and of course I said yes. I can’t imagine a more beautiful thing. I’ve always painted over what lies in front of me; but my son had painted his dreams all around him instead.