Joy!

Blossoms of many colors, forms, and size fill the scene. No two exotic butterflies are alike. Much of the visual imagery in this painting is delightfully busy. Yet, the tone, the meaning is so simple. New life embraces the wonder and variety of life with pure and simple love. Even the colorful greenery seems to hug this scene in a kind of heart ring of flowers. The baby is simply in the moment. The carefree fact of one foot with a sock and one without is long since forgotten. Nor, by contrast, does it matter that the magenta butterfly matches the baby’s butterfly top. Neither does the baby care that the butterfly has perched just short of the baby’s outstretched finger. As for the sock without a foot, the green butterfly seems hardly without envy for those of its species that have seemingly found their mark. The scent of the baby’s sock is sweet enough. New life perpetuates its sense of immediate wonder in each of the fawns standing in the background clearing, each taken in his or her own direction by life’s calling. In subtle contrast are the two adult deer, half-camouflaged in the brush, cautiously stepping out in measured conformity, in quiet search for a life long past. Perhaps their quest still has life. One can only wonder what more marvelous splendor and “joy” the center fawn and the baby see as they look beyond the painting’s edge and into our world.