I've always felt drawn to water. When I was a kid, growing up in St Petersburg, I'd look into the depths of the Neva River, wondering what lay there beneath the icy green. Or else, I’d imagine myself like Amphibian Man, Russia's answer to Aquaman, who'd walk through a portal to traverse the bottom of the ocean.

In the summers, my grandfather and I retreated to our family's dacha and the beaches nearby, overlooking Finland. I'd gaze at that steely expanse of gray and imagine another country — a thin band tracing the horizon. It's telling, too, that during my disorienting and sometimes traumatic immigration to this country, I read Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the ocean’s mysteries offering a refuge, even as my own home receded from view.

It makes sense, then, that the same magnetism exerted by the ocean would draw me to the beach and its hazy horizons as an adult. The pictures from which these paintings stem form a distant archive, a beach photographed in 2010. At the time, I noticed the fog enshrouding the sand, water, and our Fire Island rental, and rushed outside to capture the otherworldly light and disappearing landscape — the people in it often reduced to mere silhouettes or sentinels overlooking a blank abyss. But it was more than vacation scenery that resonated through these pictures. Somehow the fog transformed into a political metaphor, so reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s atmospheric films — a metaphor for our country and its endless impasses, wandering, and fragility.

Today, these images resonate the same way as the uncertainties of our future comingle with the realities of climate change. Painting has that rare ability to offer a multitude of meanings, each equally available, hovering in the air and waiting for us as viewers to pluck them as they converge with our lived realities. It is for this reason that I return to these images, again rich with connotation and timeliness, much as I returned to the seaside during my childhood and throughout my life. That empty horizon still calls me, as it often does every person who stands across from it, offering a question mark, an enigma, and a promise.

Peter Rostovsky
2025