Flowers on a Window Sill

Painting dreams is a meditation that brings joy: I mean, brushing pasty, colored stuff on a piece of paper or fabric with your fingers and brushes and some water or oil — the act itself — creates joy. And gratitude. Why, I don’t know, so years ago I stopped trying to understand dreams, those invisible visitors, and just painted them as best I could, whenever they happened to tug at my sleeve. However, when you get down to the nub, it’s the same with painting anything else, whether it’s street corners, other human beings, clouds and space, dogs and cats, snowstorms, flowers: the subject doesn’t matter.

For me, everything I want to paint seems to flow out of a feeling of wonder, and paying attention to wonder: What’s going on here? Like those yellow things poking upwards and the red things falling under their own weight? We call them “flowers” and give them names, like “geraniums.’ They grow out of “dirt,” like the green things, called “trees,” that are reflected in what we call “windows.” Everything we see here (and everything we don‘t see) depends on an energy we call “sunlight.” It creates “shadows” on a “wall” that is “weathered.”

Before I die, I would like to paint the energy — the verb, I mean — that flows through these nouns. For the moment, paying homage to flowers on a window sill and stains on the wall of an old house that used to shelter farmworkers, in a summer morning’s sunlight, in the southern part of Switzerland, this brings immeasurable joy, and gratitude. Painting this is just another way of painting dreams.