This Spring, on one of my bike routes, coming down a gentle hill, I suddenly found myself in the middle of a field bursting with poppies.
As a child, I lived in the countryside. Next to our house there was some cultivated farmland, enclosed by two paths and an irrigation ditch, which one morning appeared completely covered in poppies. It was as if they’d all agreed to open at the same time.
The red of the flowers was so compact that it looked like a red flag. Well no, not like a flag – the richness of the red and the subtle movement of the surface had the quality of blood, a lake of blood. Not the spilled blood that Lorca sang of, it was the blood of life, like the blood pumped by a heart in love, with a double dose of oxygen. Or the pounding blood that swells the lips of adolescents, even before the kiss they are about to receive. Or the lifeblood that rushes breathless to fill the corpora cavernosa of our cocks. Blood, anyway – blood where blood should be.
Fascinated, and treading very carefully so as not to ruin a single petal, I moved into the mass of poppies. When I reached the middle, I lay down face up to the sky, intoxicated by the saturation of colour and the voluptuous smell of opium. I closed my eyes. I could feel how the poppies swayed in unison around me like those banks of fish that move as one.
The breeze plucked a pleasant muffled sound from the flowers as they moved, like when you listen to the music of a party through a wall. Or as life must be perceived from inside our mother’s womb.
I opened my eyes and saw a tiny plane crossing the sky and I imagined then how I would look from up there – a pale body, slim and small, cut starkly into a flat red surface.
This Spring I realised that this moment I lived so many years ago could be the origin of my red paintings, where a pale figure silhouetted on a red background does nothing – nothing except tremble with life.