Milan, circa 1495
I was in Verrocchio’s workshop before Leonardo was well known and I was in Milan when he was painting the Last Supper and I want to record something specific about what it was like to be in proximity to a mind like his, because it is relevant to something I have been thinking about in connection with the album I am making.
Leonardo did not paint what he saw. He painted what was true beneath what he saw. Every line he drew was a question about the nature of the thing he was drawing: what force produces this shadow, what is the relationship between this light source and this surface, what is actually happening here that the visible surface only partially reveals. He painted The Last Supper while Milan prepared for war. He was completely absorbed in the problem of how to paint betrayal on a human face, how to show the moment when the thing that cannot be said aloud becomes visible in twelve different expressions simultaneously.
What he understood, and what I have been trying to understand in the music I am making, is that the surface and the truth beneath the surface are not separate things. The shadow is not less real than the light. The crack in the architecture is not a failure of the architecture: it is the architecture revealing what it was always going to do under sufficient pressure. The beauty and the betrayal are not dancing. They are the same movement.
The Geometry of Ruin is an attempt to paint what is true beneath what is visible. The album arrives May 22.