INTERVIEWER: Can you clarify how you came to this particular subject?
LETHE: I’ve always had a fascination and a pursuant interest in studying the Eastern Front.
I had this strange encounter with a photograph that I was viewing in a book. I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of photographs, obviously, and I had seen this particular photograph a long time ago, but I hadn’t seen it in perhaps fifteen years.
It was a photograph of a German POW, very ragged, being held by a Soviet guardsman at the end of the encirclement at Stalingrad, during Operation Ring.
I had seen the photograph before. When I returned to it years later, something in it had changed—or I had.
There was a ricochet of energy. It reoriented my compass.
And I haven’t put down my brush since.
INTERVIEWER: What was it about the Eastern Front that held you?
LETHE: It is Homeric in scale.
A lot of people understand war through things like Full Metal Jacket. We understand war on a visual and aesthetic level through culture, but there is an aspect of it that is perhaps the most fascinating and, quite frankly, should be viewed more: the Eastern Front.
Stalingrad was one of the largest battles in human history. Within it are some of the most daring, heroic, savage, noble, and depraved moments that you could comprehend within that period.
It is such a flowing, unique traffic of history, social culture, warfare, and masculinity that you simply don’t quite have samples of anywhere else in history.
But the true subject of my work is not war alone. It is the remnants and residue woven through it and carried beyond it.
I approach the Eastern Front as an immense philosophical, psychological, and human field.
INTERVIEWER: Why do you feel such a personal connection to it?
LETHE: I have had a very beautiful life—a very complex life. Often, people I know say, “It sounds like a film, your life,” which is sort of a problem and sort of not, to be honest with you.
As a child, unfortunately, I experienced within myself that feeling of being encircled and captured. For several years, I endured a very violent personal experience that, through the perspective of a child, appeared almost like a prisoner-of-war experience.
I feel that traumatic, obviously, but also incredibly empowering event has given me the ability, in some way, shape, or form, to connect with this subject and resonate with it as a witness instead of an outsider.
As a child, I was violently attacked and mobbed by my peers for many years. Although it was not a proper, active war, I was absolutely, within myself, inside a front. It was simply an entirely different war.
For a child, although the front was not a standard war, it was an intrinsic microcosm of war as a macrocosmic concept, from my perspective.
INTERVIEWER: When did that connection become part of your painting?
LETHE: Initially, I had a relationship with history as a child. I can remember that from my youth, but it was among many different aspects and periods of history that stood out to me.
Then, about six and a half or seven years ago, a very beloved person of mine got me a book of photographs from the Eastern Front, and there was a particular image in there.
I saw that image—which I’m sure I’m going to have tattooed on me—and it was like missing wiring in the machine that is my brain, I suppose. It brought my personal context back to something of the utmost importance.
I hadn’t painted since I was twelve. Then I saw that photograph, and I haven’t put down my brush since.
There was something physical about it. It was like having a detonator. You’re doing work in the field and you have to clear the structure. You light the fuse, right?
That image was the fuse within my artistic output.
INTERVIEWER: You had artistic ability before that?
LETHE: Yes, absolutely. I was always very talented artistically as a child. But I had my artistic challenges, particularly because my mother found my sketchbook when I was young. It was personal, and I wasn’t harming anyone. I felt so distressed by that experience that, for well over a decade, I wouldn’t do any art at all.
Upon seeing that image, it lit the fuse, per se.
I started painting and dipping my toes into this body of work, contacting POWs and doing archival and academic research as well. I sought out trips and began investigating it in person.
Historical material enters the studio through photographs, testimony, correspondence, maps, objects, and fragments.
I do not use the archive as illustration. It is where the encounter begins.
Research and intuition remain inseparable within the work.
INTERVIEWER: What happens when you encounter one of these archival photographs?
LETHE: I do not encounter every archival photograph as a static historical image.
At times, a figure refuses to remain entirely fixed within it. A posture, an expression, or a particular inward distance continues to exert a presence long after the event itself has passed.
Most, if not all, of the individuals I paint remain anonymous. Many likely never saw the photograph in which they appeared. Some may not have known the image was taken at all.
Decades later, I meet them through paint.
I am not reconstructing history. I am searching for what remains within it.
I am sifting on canvas what my eyes see in my subjects’ eyes.
INTERVIEWER: Why a world called Lethe? Why is that the moniker you chose?
LETHE: The name I chose comes from mythology.
Lethe is the river of oblivion and also the personification of forgetfulness. There is the choice between the waters of Mnemosyne—memory and recollection—and Lethe, the waters of oblivion.
I choose to look, at a somewhat macrocosmic level, artistically, at this landscape of the Eastern Front through the persona of Lethe herself: viewing this huge detritus, and at the same time the intimate subjects and knowledge contained within the Front, as if I were Lethe herself viewing what was remaining after the event.
It is a position between memory and disappearance.
INTERVIEWER: What is unknown about the people you paint? Why does that matter?
LETHE: I cannot completely associate words with why it matters.
But I have felt my whole life that there was something pulling me toward this subject.
The paintings begin with archival photographs, but they do not remain there. I return to particular figures, gestures, and expressions until the static image begins to open into something less fixed.
I am drawn to what remains after an extreme event: what survives anonymity, what persists beneath collapse, and what continues after memory has begun to erode.
There is something valuable and important there to humanity, especially men as a whole.
INTERVIEWER: Has making the work changed your relationship with life?
LETHE: I have a newfound appreciation for life.
History is multifaceted, and through what I have to share—perhaps even about this particular facet through which my work lives—you may see something that fosters recollection, or feeling, or fellowship, or simply something that strengthens your own being.
History itself is incredibly applicable to the now and to the individual.
INTERVIEWER: Does someone need to understand the history to understand the paintings?
LETHE: It’s not created solely for the educated man.
I do believe that every man, particularly men—I don’t really make art toward women, and I don’t know how women hear anything within what I do in the work—can ask: What does this show you on an individual level?
And, exactly enough, it doesn’t lead you.
If there were a desire to search further, that would be available, but it could be comprehended simply on that initiatory visual level as well.
INTERVIEWER: You keep returning to the individual man within this enormous history. Why?
LETHE: I’ve had a very complex life. I’ve lost a lot, including those that I loved.
There were times in my life when I utterly, completely, honestly tried to end my life.
The threshold was so huge, and I was so lonely and felt so encircled by society as a whole, suppressing this inner self on an actual level.
And then you are looking at millions of men and their lives with color.
To delve into a conflict this incredibly broad and physical—intelligent, good men, like you, your father, and your friends—these were real men constrained within one of the largest choreographies of ideology and industry ever brought against men.
That is entirely at the heart of why I am even writing about this.
INTERVIEWER: You also mentioned 1984. What connection do you see there?
LETHE: 1984 has always had a kind of odd and comforting English style to me, even as a small child.
It is a literary example of the human condition within the framing of opposing totalitarian states, and how the man—the everyman, the individual man—is affected.
Every man in World War II, whether American, Japanese, German, Soviet—he is still just a man like you and I.
We don’t have some mysterious ideological meaning toward our state, yet these men were expected to fight, or were told to.
Alongside the fact that I’m a researcher of World War II and Eastern Front warfare, what interests me is the physical and psychological occupied space within the mass of these men.
Despite what is said about both parties, there were acts of kindness toward the enemy. There was still respect to some extent. The enemy remained human.
That interests me immensely.
INTERVIEWER: How far does Stalingrad extend beyond this particular body of work?
LETHE: If you looked at my body of work as a map, Stalingrad would be an extremity of the narrative.
The world that exists within that narrative is the Eastern Front itself.
Stalingrad is enormous, but it opens into something even larger.
INTERVIEWER: How do you intend to build this over the next decade?
LETHE: I have no plans on ending it.
If that were a possibility, I would know, but I have no inclination whatsoever to deviate from it.
I have innumerable things to show, share, and look at on a minute level about the Front, and other facets of the Front that are equally as important.
I have no inkling of slowing down, nor do I lack any fire to keep fuelling and sharing my world with you.
INTERVIEWER: What kind of relationship are you inviting with the work?
LETHE: I would like collectors, academics, podcasters, debaters, historians, professors, battlefield archaeologists, art lovers, military-history buffs, curators, writers, collaborators, and serious benefactors.
I would also like to find an agent and a team that could help me disseminate and market this.
I know I have something, and I want to show it and share it with as many people as possible.
Eventually, I want to give back—especially to combat veterans—in a way that is useful and important.
There are innumerable things still to show.
I’m not finished.
Vorwärts.