The Sixth Land
This painting, made in 1991, is called Enter the Sixth Land
The Sixth Land is a bit like where we are, but also different and strange. You have to go on a journey to get there. On this journey, you realise that everything is different. That everything has already happened, and everything has changed. This journey changes you. On this journey, you feel a new kind longing in your soul for the first time.
It is vivid, yet hard to recall. It is far away, but close by. It is inside a mountain and across the sea and in the desert and through a forest.
The name, the Sixth Land, comes from a dream that was compelling enough for me to remember it clearly for a long time afterwards, and even for variations on the same theme.
The Sixth Land soon entered my notebooks as a shorthand for when something unusual or notable caught my eye.
It encapsulates the overlooked strangeness hidden in the mundane and commonplace, the old and the new, that surrounds me as a city-dweller, as well as the very far away; the different and exotic.