This piece is based on the visions inspired by one of the passages from Hermann Hesse’s book Wandering: Notes and Sketches, a magic-garden world painted as fiction that reads both as an autobiography and a meditation on his attempt to reinvent himself after the war.

“Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. If one listens to trees silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”

Original: Pencil, pigment liner, watercolor, and digital collage.