The Secret Life cannot be explained in words; otherwise it would not be a secret life! It falls, in Cohen’s own words, “among the voices and the wine”.
The paintings are a direct response to songs from Leonard Cohen’s albums “The Future” [1992] and “Ten New Songs” [2001]. Although all the songs effected me in a positive way, certain lines appealed because of their striking imagery, often dark but never despondent. The music itself was also a source of ideas
Leonard Cohen, for me, always evokes pictures. The setting, ostensibly, is nearly always urban yet his mind is constantly elsewhere: we are frequently drawn to some rural landscape or seascape.
However, he frequently evokes a time and place that existed eternities ago. Trees and rivers and seas have been around for a very long time; traffic jams only in the last few decades. The paintings do not represent Cohen’s urban world, but a world that belongs to no particular time and place, a world imagined when you close your eyes and nod off for a split second. Yes, they do indeed seem to fall among the voices and the wine!