Summer Night Dream

SUMMER NIGHT DREAM
In the summer of 2016, after five days of trekking through the jungle of the Santa Marta mountains in Colombia toward the Ciudad Perdida — the Lost City, buried for centuries under vegetation and silence — something happened on the final night that had nothing to do with archaeology.
The group stepped outside into the dark, and the sky opened.
The Milky Way — the full arch of it, unobstructed by any light except its own — stretched across the mountain sky with a clarity that is simply unavailable to anyone who has spent their life in cities. And then, on the mountains below, the fireflies. Thousands of them, lighting and going dark and lighting again across the jungle slopes, their cold green light answering the stars above in a conversation that had been happening every summer night in those mountains long before any human being was there to witness it.
There are moments in a life that permanently recalibrate your sense of scale. This was one of them.
Summer Night Dream was painted from that night — the vessel, the human being as container, filling with an experience so much larger than the ordinary self that the only honest response was to stop thinking and simply receive it. The background carries the memory of that sky: stars and fireflies indistinguishable, the universe folding down into a mountainside, the mountainside folding up into the universe. Beside the vessel, a cluster of grapes — ripe, present, entirely of this world — a reminder that what we call reality on an ordinary Tuesday is only the thinnest fraction of what actually exists.
The Lost City was extraordinary. The night sky above it was something else entirely.
105 × 105 cm (image) · 120 × 120 cm (canvas) · Acrylic and mixed media on 100% cotton canvas · 2022 · One of a kind Unframed, delivered rolled. Signed, titled and dated on the reverse. Certificate of Authenticity included.