After Rain

Part the leaves and climb in: a small, fresh-green world of mushrooms, where you are not so much looking at it as sitting inside it.

A whimsical woodland watercolour of mushrooms, brought out as an archival fine art print.

It is the twin of Green Lush, made beside it, the same move into Green Cabinet but through a different shelf: the mushrooms. You have pulled the leaves apart and found the world growing underneath, and the green painted in behind tells you that you are inside it. After rain is when mushrooms grow, and that is all the name means.

This is the simple one. The others are years to read; this is a hideaway you sit inside, green all around, sunlight through the leaves, the insects moving. It is full of small treasures, the kind that are valuable only because you found them, the way a rock you picked up as a child was the best thing you owned that year. They are mine, but they are finds, not memories. These are just mushrooms.

The whole green background is not a wash but hundreds of separate leaves, each with its own edge, and I painted them last, after the picture was finished and unfixed. One drop too much water at any edge would have bled the whole thing into mud with no way back, so every leaf was a steady-handed risk laid up against the next.

There is a lot to find. The black cat sits near the centre, the easiest place in any of my paintings to learn to spot it. A family of forest folk gather, two big and three small with a bee above their heads; three of the Before the Bell monks have come to sit on the mushrooms; the calm woman returns, this time in red; and there is a younger, smaller me tucked in too, along with the music I love and a line of the Tao. The peach-red rose from Green Lush is painted into the background, the surest sign anywhere in the shop that two of these paintings are a pair.

The colour is a bright, fresh light green I had not used before, and it does the work of the painting: it closes the space around you until you feel you are sitting somewhere small and new. It is less a picture to read than a place to go, a green hideaway on the wall to climb into when you want somewhere fresh and safe. The original is 17 centimetres square.

Printed to order on Hahnemühle German Etching, a heavyweight 310gsm mould-made fine art paper, acid- and lignin-free to museum standard, with archival pigment inks. A giclée from an original watercolour by Léna Ruisz, never a mass reproduction, colour-managed to stay true to the original painting. Because every screen shows colour a little differently, what you see on your device may vary slightly from the finished print. Free worldwide shipping, arriving ready to live with. No frame is forced on you, so choose the size that fits your wall.

You are buying the fine art print only. The frame shown in the product image, and any mount, furniture, plants or other props in the photographs, are there to show scale and setting. They are not included in your purchase.