"Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is the most remarkable; with the possible exception of a moose singing 'Embraceable You' in spats" *

Allow me to tell you something about one of the artist's pieces on the wall. It is placed to the right of the one being worked on presently, though it feels just as present. Basically it is a wilfully executed image of a tree, a laurel tree, in a fertile garden. It is like the garden of life and most of the image is like a controlled explosion of leaves and plants and ... well, life. There are flowers - yellow tulips, one or two red - and leaves and shrubs, and herbs, everywhere. Running through the piece is a lazy and lyrical half-hidden old wooden garden fence, not unlike a toy train pushed together by a child. To the right in the image, if you look closely enough, is a child, a boy, pulling a face. And yet the piece is not about him but about the tree, the garden. He is perhaps simply our chorus. And there is more. Through some of the laurel leaves you can see a hint of blue sky, but this is so framed by even more leaves and branches you have to work very hard to identify it as sky at all. I can remember the day the artist hunted out this image. Now it is on the living room wall awaiting the visit of a gallerist in a week or so. But it is reminding me of something else. Not just that you can be both orderly and wild, creative and masterly, at the same time. It also reminds me that what you see is not always what you get. (As if it wasn't enough in the first place.) I say this only because something was to happen we did not know at the time. You see, the laurel tree was a foot or so over the fence from the garden of the basement where we used to live. That is to say before we moved into the basement next door - yes, the very one with the garden housing the laurel tree in the piece on the wall. But wait for it, there is even more. Within a few days of moving in - almost a year ago to the day as it happens - the tree was blown over in a forceful gale and filled the entire garden like a beached whale before being chopped into pieces and taken away.
*Woody Allen (born Allen Stewart Königsberg on December 1, 1935)