made him a promise.

Today I want to show you a very special painting.This place is part of my childhood and some of my happiest memories. I painted it after a trip to Russia in 2017. It feels like a lifetime ago. My oldest son had just turned one, and my husband and I traveled to visit my parents.My parents have a big off-road vehicle, and they love exploring places where ordinary cars simply can’t go-deep forests, marshes, hidden lakes, and quiet rivers. They took us on many adventures, and this was one of those places. We spent the day fishing there and even caught a few large northern pike.This landscape is near the village of Kholuy in the Ivanovo region of Russia.Although I painted it years ago, it isn’t for sale. It is the only painting that was permanently damaged during the catastrophic flood that hit my gallery in 2021, After days of heavy rain in Belgium and Germany, a dam had to be opened overnight to prevent an even greater disaster. Nobody had time to prepare. During the night, the water rushed into the building. The flood reached almost 2.5 meters (over 8 feet) high, nearly touching the ceiling. My paintings floated in muddy water for many hours.Afterward, I washed and disinfected every painting by hand. Many survived surprisingly well, although several wooden stretcher bars warped as they dried. This painting was less fortunate. It must have fallen in just the wrong way, and part of the thick acrylic paint layer detached from the canvas. It now has a small but visible scar, and I still don’t know the best way to restore it.So it hangs in my home instead.People often ask whether it’s okay to touch my textured paintings. I always say yes you can gently touch them with your fingers or even wipe them with a damp cloth if needed. After seeing paintings survive a flood, floating in dirty water for hours, it’s hard for me to imagine that even thousands of curious fingers could do more damage than that one night did.

Maybe it's naive of me, but whenever I see portraits like this, with just a father and daughter, it restores my faith in humanity a little. Because people seem to love this idea that fathers never loved their daughters in the past and only saw them as bargaining chips for marriage or whatever, but look at the guy in the first portrait on the left, he loves that little girl! And the dad trying to do his work while his daughter bothers him with an Old Timey Barbie. The man teaching his daughter geography, his expression is so soft! The way the man in the last portrait holds the little girl's hand! And none of these are incidental, these aren't photographs, someone (probably the father) paid good money and sat down for hours so that they could have a painting of themselves and their daughter. Probably because they loved their daughter.

oh I love those! People being people is one of my favourite kinds of paintings and an important reminder that people in past times were not all that different. There were dads who loved their daughters fiercely. There were fathers who happily looked after their babies too. The German reformer Philip Melanchton for example had a cradle in his office. His wife was busy organising a household for 20 people- she was out and about, he mostly worked in his office, it made sense for him to look after their babies too babies while she dropped by at snack time.

I raise you:

The fact that they were walking 1-3mph

While we're all talking Odyssey and Greek Myth, I feel like we should take a moment to appreciate Tiresias

"Do you ever dream of land?" The whale asks the tuna.