When confronted with the disaster we are all equal.

Only our reactions are very different. It´s a whole range of emotions, from the most overwhelming powerlessness unto the impossible desire to turn back time, so that what happened didn´t happen.
But it did happen.
If we lived some centuries ago, the news would have reached us much later, maybe our children would have learned about it from the history books. But we live in a time when everything happens "live" and our neighborhood has expanded to the entire planet. Even if we wanted, we could not ignore the events that happen throughout the world.

And the news that are reaching us come accompanied by images that find us mostly unprepared, shaking us, overwhelming us, haunting us.
Among the images that haunted me after the disaster in Japan, were some coming from a total different place. At first they crept stealthily, but then they became increasingly clearer, and more insistent. Yes, they were images, but from another kind, I couldn´t see them with my eyes, not even with my minds eyes, I coud rather feel them. Sometimes I was perceiving them as bright lights, sometimes as white butterflies or birds floating all around me, slowly rising up to heaven.
So I started to paint, as if to understand what was happening. I began to paint children, because this way of expression is most powerful and readily available to me. Then, unexpectedly, everything took a dramatic turn. I found myself unable to stop. I woke up at night, obsessed by the need to paint those children who insisted to be born, to be called into being, because they had something important to say.

This is how I finally understood what they were, those images, those lights:
They were wishes. The wishes of the whole world for the sorrowed Japan.

Wishes as they arise naturally in every human being when faced with anothers misery.

Wishes for protection, for support, for help. Wishes that everything may turn out well.

This is how everything came into being and I named it "Wishes For Japan".