The Gardener at the Threshold
The gardener always finds joy in his garden. Joy in the work to prepare the earth, to plant, to tend and finally to harvest the fruit, or the flowers. Beauty in itself is, of course, also a final product and is equally as important. Enjoying the constant effort brings about peace in the simple pleasure of the garden’s silence and stillness. My first example was my mother’s humble garden, always green, always magenta, yellow and vermillion, and always grateful or thankful for her efforts.

I think being a gardener is the best work in the world, and in an attempt to emulate this ambitious task I have taken to painting as a unique opportunity of becoming a sort of gardener myself. With brushstrokes and gesture in paint, these gardens only exist on canvas or on paper, with flowers existing for the sole basis of carrying color. Similarly, the atmosphere carries water in the form of rain or mist and exists only to illustrate fields of energy; colors with mineral and metallic hues add contrast and tension between the colors of the flowers, yet always remaining in harmony as they do in nature.

I could say that these pictorial gardens are a threshold to a place where we always long to be, where we always wish to arrive. My time at Monte Azul is a source of internalized visions, with its located in a realm of ever-present flowers, mountains, tropical rains of deep tones of green, purples and blues, with red and sienna highlights.

Most of these scenes are wild gardens of rain and light, water and sun, simultaneously cold and hot with blooms floating in a cool October downpour, or in the mist in May, or even in a heavy fog in December. They could reveal a sparkle of sunlight after a downpour, as a lovely threshold into something new. All in all, lyrical themes which according to gesture and hue, move us among various states of melancholy and joy, fury and peace, anger and tenderness, as well as weeping and laughter.

Like the gardener’s realm composed of visions of color and life, the paintings offer the spectator a space at the threshold of a new and achievable reality.