Sebastiaan Bremer

 

I had almost finished the drawing I was working on when this picture was taken. The drawing is of my wife, Andrea, dissolving in the bath, ten years before, when we lived in the East village—back when I had problems getting out of baths. During the last week of working on Swimming With the Fishes, I was filled with worries. With a newborn baby daughter at home, we were waiting to see if my wife's positive TB test was for real. It wasn't. The work started out with me looking ten years back in time at Andrea; it was then overtaken by the life of being the parent of a newborn (our second); it finally ended up with that test nightmare. It was a sad immersion into the fears of a different time, like Thomas Mann's and Kafka's—but just for a week. This is what happens with a lot of my work. I start with an idea, reality intervenes, and the result is three or four or five different things at once. A bit like life itself, really. Layered and ultimately random.