This oil painting is of a red castle towering over dark green foliage, set against a blue sky. Our perspective, as audience, places us on the ground, near the trees, looking up. The framing is such that we see more sky than trees; the ground is not in the frame. The picture is color balanced: the warmth of the scarlet building is sandwiched between the earthy forest green and cool sky blue. The painting has a tactile surface with as much texture as a brick wall or a good-sized branch with leaves. Spirits dance in the picture’s sky. Though it is difficult to see them, they are there. Of course, spirits dance in the sky above us right now too, but such spirits are almost impossible to see. In this painting, though, you are able to observe the spirits. Depending on your mood, you might find the dancing lovely or frightening. What happens to us after we die? Do we enter straight into the world of spirits, or is it a stopover in purgatory? Have you ever heard of purgatory? There might be a chapter in the Bible that describes it, or maybe it is in the Catholic Catechism. I do not know and have never read anything about purgatory. But when I was a young boy I heard about purgatory from a deeply religious woman who was my mother’s friend and also my friend’s mother. Once, as I was with my friend and her mother, we were leaving the church and, as we dipped our fingers in the holy water and made the sign of the cross, this woman told me that each time that you take holy water upon your fingers, make the sign of the cross, and pray to God, a soul is released from purgatory, a place, she explained, where souls go to make amends for their sins before they are able to enter heaven. This freaked me out and so I began to repeatedly dip my fingers in holy water and make the sign of the cross. When it appeared that I was prepared to release as many souls from purgatory that my mind imagined were there, she told me that what I was doing was loving, but that we had to get going. It was not long before someone explained that there was an actual limit to how many souls I could release from purgatory when I entered or exited church. I accepted this news just as fast as I accepted the powers that my friend’s mother had promised me I had, and I stopped attempting to create a mass exodus from purgatory each time I approached holy water. Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing in purgatory, holy water, and prayer. I do not believe in spirits anymore either, but that does not mean that I do not see them dancing in pictures or in the sky above me.

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