When the painter considers the work finished, that is not the end but on the contrary, it is when the life and adventures of the painting start. If the life of each painting were to be written, one would become aware about my statement. I have been witness of many stories about or rather reasons for which someone decided to buy, one day, a painting without thinking about neither the investment nor the analysis, but because of many other deeper reasons. I shall now tell you one of them.

It happened in my exhibition at the Nova gallery in Malaga, in November 2001. We were unloading the paintings to start to put them up in the walls when a lady (already deceased) passed by the Gallery and, when she stopped, she noticed one of the paintings representing a “mother of the African paintings” who is carrying her dying son and she is surrounded by other children… which are not living children… they are dead… dead who want to live.

This painting, which the painter telling this story owns, together with others that express the horrors of wars and misery in Africa, was going to be shown under the title “The Theology of Expression”. These paintings were just going to be shown and they were not for sale but the lady protagonist of this story asked the gallery owner about the price of the painting, and when he replied that it was not for sale, she insisted on talking to the painter. When she contacted me, she told me directly that she wanted the painting because she saw her pain reflected in it; she had been able to talk to that mother who was suffering so much; she told me that she would pay all the money she could to buy that painting because she wanted to continue that dialogue at home and privately while she would live.

I sold her the painting for the money she wanted and could pay. The lady was a painter. Three months after buying the painting she did an exhibition with her last works and, when her exhibition ended, she passed away. She was sick with cancer and the day she saw the painting for the first time, she had just come out of the hospital from a radiotherapy treatment.

Each painting has its own life which is always alien to its creator, as for when the Work is finished, it is no longer his, and as it has its own life; it starts its own adventure.

    
    Jorge Rando, Madrid, November 2003