Light flowers: “We are the soul of the flower. We are the flower soul.” (Claude van de Berge)

In the temples of Bhutan I saw for the first time flowerlike discs of Yak butter and rice flour, which serve as offering, so called ‘torma’s’.

Their appearance hit me, because the latest painting I made just before my journey showed identical discs of light build out of concentric circles!

A journey through Bhutan (1991) inspired me to make a series of paintings of circles with radiating centre which reminded of stars and flowers. It was the most distant travel I ever made. The paintings that I made afterwards probably are the most interiorized images that I made till now.

The discs made part of a horizontal-vertical composition. For the first time I painted with curved dashes and comma’s — at first I used to hatch with strait dashes — which lighted up against a dark background.

At that time I wrote: “My imaginations of the ‘torma’ concept appear to be compact metaphors of my experiences and of the attempt to accept live with all its contradistinctions as completeness. It is a journey throughout all colours of the rainbow.”

I made an excerpt from this torma series in a hand bound book (50 editions) with short poems. Here are three poems:

Only the rhythm
in which one color penetrates the other
and the coming to light of all colors in all.

Colors clear a silent way
shining through their opposites,
release it selves while mirroring
from internal obscurity.

At the limits of visibility
the sound extends invisible
in ever more spacious rings
till there where nothing can be heard or seen;
and where a stone was cast
water is mirror
and all transparent.

After I completed this series of these meditative images I focussed on the layered story of the landscape and visible nature outside of me and continued doing so for a long period of time.

Now, June 2015, I can see the relation between the ‘Torma series’ and the painting ‘Fertilization’.

The geometric composition with one centre of the ‘Torma’ made place for an organic composition with several centres which are connected on a flowing way. One can presume it is a garden. I call this series ‘Light garden’, while my garden is the place where nature is most nearby: in the morning I can overlook my garden from my studio and living room and sometimes watch the transparant green in the misty backlight.

In October 2011 I made the first ‘Light garden’ painting (see detail below), and the sequel was awaited for four years. Although, in the series charcoal drawings of 2013 the light flowers were already visible.

I return to my inner space, but this time fulfilled by the fullness of visible nature. And without the urgency to see outside and inside world as two different moments.

Once more my journey throughout colours enters a new stage. Painting becomes being present, at the intersection of the created and the non-created?