"‘Tashkent’ is curious for me, in that it’s rooted in a false memory. It commenced in an abandoned effort at a theme from the book of Samuel,- and the n’th time I had abandoned it. The painting then floundered between traces of its previous state and hints of what might be yet to come, which is a state most painters are well, if not happily, acquainted with. What then took shape was the image of a tree I had seen once in an obscure quarter of Palermo, which was festooned with shoes: dozens of them, of all kinds, colours and forms, beset like a Christmas tree. Just how this image should have elicited the idea of Tashkent is still difficult to trace, but here is my best effort so far. Tashkent is close to the village in Uzbekistan where my parents sheltered during the worst years of the war, as their families perished back in Poland and Lithuania. The exotic foliage growing in the painting was surely an association. But I now think that a painterly link existed too: the image of a pointy, Levantine shoe around which Gorky built his several versions of ‘Garden in Sochi’. He painted the first in 1941, as my parents crossed the border from Lithuania into the Soviet Union just prior to the German invasion. And Sochi! The other Sochi, the one on the Black Sea, to which we never quite made it for vacation, despite my father’s promises. Finally, the memory business: it wasn’t until my partner saw the painting and heard me talk about it that she exclaimed: ‘Shoes? What shoes?! They weren’t shoes, they were chairs!’"