Garden with Roosters 1917

Gustav Klimt’s painting, Garden with Roosters, is a dreamy space, overgrown with flowers and inhabited by a few chickens. I imagine him out there, brush in hand, trying to capture the abundance, the riotous life of a garden. What I love about this painting is how Klimt doesn't try to tame the chaos. He lets the flowers spill out, a joyful mess of color and shape. You can almost feel the buzzing of the bees and the warm sun on your skin, right? The paint itself is thick in places, like he’s piling it on, trying to match the sheer volume of the garden. And then those roosters, strutting along the path, like they own the place. He was part of this ongoing conversation, this exchange of ideas and looking. Ultimately, painting is that thing we do to make sense of our experiences and our lives. It’s about embracing ambiguity, uncertainty, and opening a space for multiple interpretations, where meaning can shift and change over time.