My mom recently showed me the photograph that inspired this painting. They were visiting a friend in Vermont, and this is his version of what he saw out their window; I had no idea that my father had even been to Vermont, let alone had a great fondness for it. When I decided to go to college there in 2005, he was happy, proud, bashful. When we’d gone on the school tour, I assumed that Dad was also seeing these things for the first time. I’d never even camped in the forest before I got to college. On the inaugural back-to-school shopping trip to Walmart, the next town over, two hunters pulled into the parking lot with a deer carcass strapped to the roof of their truck. I didn’t know if I should have taken it as a sign. My dad was excited about the school—he wanted it to push me down the path of success as a writer. Both of our favorite features on the campus were the small, slanted windows in the dorm.

There is something so beautifully liminal about this work. The light is a shade of an indeterminate hour, and whether the day is starting or ending isn’t clear. There was a specific time of day in the winter months when you could be opening your eyes to first light or having slept until sunset. I remembered that feeling as soon as I saw the painting and title again. I was two when he painted this, and it’s hard to think that life could have come so full circle—even the windows in the painting look similar to the ones in my Vermont room. Peaceful as it was with the huge field in the middle of the campus, it never quite grasped the solitude that Vermont Window holds for me. The visual of the work makes me want to kick off my shoes and ascend into the frame to get lost in the dense geometry of the wallpaper and impossible green of its grass.

- Misa Kobayashi