Vermeer?  I think it’s not quite understood how powerful he is,  how powerful those paintings are and how they totally reach out to you and tell you everything you have to know about life.

It’s so hard to talk about painting – but it’s all there – talk about ‘thereness’ – not only about this life, but about past lives. That’s what I experience when I look at Vermeer.

Did I ever tell you about my trip to Holland?

We were given three days in Holland because we had done a job for KLM and so we were given a free trip – besides being paid of course – well, at that time, in the late Sixties, everybody was very generous and so we had three days to do everything.

We were in this museum, me and Yehuda – my husband – and Zamir, my son. Zamir was about 10 and he was totally bored and he started running and Yehuda ran after him and then I ran after them both.

Then something happened in a split second – I was just going past all these paintings and suddenly I felt I was somewhere else. Not in the museum. I was outside of it, and I was walking – but still in Holland and I was all in black and not in modern clothes. It was a totally occult experience -these things never happen to me but i remember it now. I was getting a look into a past life.

I looked up, to see what was doing it, and it was that painting. Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.

So I’ve had kind of a reverence for this painting ever since then…and maybe that’s what gave rise to the feeling  that ‘thereness’ is what I’m looking for in my painting – that thing that makes it live forever. Some things just live forever.

She is so completely there – all the Vermeers are like that, but this is the one that did it for me. I’m going to see it again and I’m almost scared of it.

Nothing does it for me like Vermeer.