Sleeping in the Roots 1939

Tove Jansson made this gorgeous watercolour, Sleeping in the Roots, and you can see the tree's roots and how they kind of glow. I can imagine Jansson almost meditatively laying down each layer of watercolour. And then, bam! Little creatures appear in the tree’s cozy root nooks. The green washes against the dark sky, and there are those warm rooty reds and yellows, like a sunset. What was Jansson thinking when she painted this? Maybe it was a quiet moment of looking—just seeing what’s already there, hidden in plain sight. She’s like a bunch of other painters, Alice Neel, maybe, or Florine Stettheimer, finding her own way to picture the world, making up her own mind, and being OK with how strange that is. And isn’t that just like life? It's all one big conversation, this painting thing, with each artist adding their own weird, beautiful voice.