Knowing full well that an artist has no control over what comes next in their painterly journey, I chose not to resist events as they unfolded but to go with the flow. Later in our excursion, my wife and I found ourselves in the next town, Stoughton, and at the local IKEA, where we intended to have lunch at the in-store restaurant. Soon, we made our way to the food court and, even though it was well past lunch hour, joined a busy line of patrons on a similar mission. It did not take long before we sat at a table with plates of food in front of us.

I started with a plate of Swedish meatballs, potatoes, peas, and lingonberry sauce, followed by a generous portion of mousse and two cups of unsweetened black tea. On the way out, I had no choice but to join my wife as she pursued her lifelong pastime, walking through the shopping departments, hoping to discover a surprise item. After more than forty years together, I knew to let my wife get on with whatever she had set her mind to do, and I was quite pleased to be a reluctant participant. Contrary to my expectations, despite our walking the length of the endless, interlocking corridors of the shopping hall, she did not find any such item to purchase. And slowly, we began to exit the main hall, walking toward the row of registers and the exit. Then, all of a sudden, she made a right turn toward a small section dedicated to discounted stock and one-off items.

Resigned to her shopping idiosyncrasies, I followed obediently. Again, I prayed she wouldn’t find anything interesting or worth buying to add to the ever-growing pile of barely used items in our house. When she abruptly paused by a stack of medium-sized framed prints, everything changed. It only took one look to understand what she meant.

“You could do wonders with this stack of canvases,” she announced.

 She, too, immediately knew what was to follow. To me, a chance discovery was about to shape the next chapter of my ever-changing artistic journey. As described, this sequence of events is a familiar, recurring one in our household and is probably not so strange to others. To cut a long story short, by the time we walked out of the building, I had six framed prints in my hands and planned to return in a couple of days, once I figured out what to do with them. Needless to say, she had even more reason not to leave empty-handed, so she used the excuse to visit the frozen-food outpost just on the other side of the row of registers. She came away with two packets of Swedish vegetable medallions. From there, one thing led to another, and the story inspired the title of this series of paintings.

 The galleries—Gallery-J, Gallery-B, and Gallery-G—chosen to showcase the creation of these paintings, reflect the three parts that define