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In Zurich during 1987, about the time I began working in watercolour, I met the gallery owner and modern art dealer Brigitte de Almeida Lopes through a mutual friend.

Every two years or so I would appear in Switzerland with my work of the preceding period. She truly looked at the work I brought, spending hours with me and my paintings; but during those hours she said little. Enormous tension would build within me as I awaited a few cryptic but evocative comments about the most successful works. Occasionally she would single out a painting I considered a dismal failure and point out how, in that work, I had reached an openness and expressiveness that made the other more "successful” works pale in comparison. Often only a year or two later would I begin to grasp the meaning of her statement.

The seed of this painting trip was formed in one of our last sessions together. At lunch, after a morning looking at my work, she said suddenly, "I want to go to Venice in spring and paint the light." I was inspired as I remembered the levantine light and said something like, "Yes, the afternoon light on the brick and plaster walls." "No, she corrected me, "just the light...paint the light."

Since she did not paint hersef, I took the words as instruction and stored the plan until an opportune time.

Brigitte Lopes died of breast cancer in the spring of 1991 while I was in Nepal during a year of painting. Walls and trees are still recognizable in my work with a consistency that would disappoint her; I have not reached my Zen master’s goal of painting pure light. But with each painting, with each conscious breath, I intoned the mantra she had given me: “Paint the light...paint the light...”

David Haughton, Vancouver 1994