Last year, I took the opportunity to spend some days in Latvia at a friend’s place. I had a working meeting in Kaunas and Latvia is only a stone’s throw away.
I have been several times in Riga (a beautiful city!) and surroundings but this time I wanted to explore a bit more of the country. I rented a car and left Kaunas towards Latvia on small roads and very soon dived into pure nature. There are endless deep woods, vast greenery. You can drive for hours without seeing anything of human interventions, it’s just green and a blue sky on top. And a lot of storks, I saw hundreds, on the fields, in the air, walking along the roads, buildings nests.
It’s a perfect environment to recover from stress, it slows you down immediately. It is so green!
Our friend lives in a small town but towns and villages are like big green parks, dotted with houses. So much space between the houses, every with a garden where people grow what they eat, some are situated close to a small lake or river where they catch fishes. They live in and from the nature but taking care of it with huge respect.
It’s a really sustainable living, not rich in a material sense, but resilient.
It reminded me a bit on my childhood, when I spent my summer holidays in a small village, being outside the day, building tree houses, roaming through fields and forest.
All this I tried to put into the painting "Latvia".
Somehow, it felt like a lost paradise. But after four days, I needed a city. I was longing for people, cafes, streets, shops, galleries. I realized, I could not live in a place without having the lively feeling of a city.