A Rose

The rose has been loved for as long as people have made art — revered by the Greeks, the Persians, the Chinese, tied always to love, honour, and secrecy. I won't pretend to know botany. What draws me is the rose as it lives in the imagination: muse to poets and painters, the red one above all the very colour of passion.

A single red rose still says what we find hardest to say. We give it instead of the words. And without that feeling, a life would seem as bare as a garden missing its one prized bloom.

So I keep returning to it on paper — not a botanical study but the rose as emotion, my nature theme at its warmest. Its beauty outlasts the people who painted it, and it will outlast me.

An original painting. Signed.

Jolanta Johnsson