My coat/mane/eye colours – red, yellow, blue, white and grey – may seem uncanny or revolting at first, as ponies’ colour charts are for the most part non-contrasting (e.g. analogous, triadic). Indeed, my parents told me that just hours after my foaling a small commotion had gathered around me discussing on how strange I looked. Some said I was a child of the sun itself, others were discussing more reasonable factors that might have led to this fancy combination, but my parents didn’t pass judgement. They saw me as a painter, and I held a paintbrush before I first talked; as the seasons rolled by they often taught me mathematics through diagrams and naturalistic landscapes instead of symbolic notation. Heck, I don’t even understand a chip of what category theory is! Those were cheerful times, and my frequent flights to and in De Biesbosch kept those exotic species in my head.

But there was something creeping towards my brain, like a crack creeping across fatigued metal or a stalactite growing downwards to meet a stalagmite. Nature was getting boring because it was nature. Soon I laid limp on a cloud, my former magic drained, unsure of how to live. I was there for a whole month… no, not a hunger strike, yes, it was me trying to chart future directions. The green tint in my eyes faded away, leaving a drab grey. Everything blurred before me, the variegated forests and houses reduced to their hues, their boundaries swirling and straightening into solid black lines as psychedelics would leave me. Eventually I lost my wings even though I had them and the cloud caved in, starting my tumble into oblivion… only to be saved by a kind farmer who gave me some corn. By then, though, my idea of art had been devastated; no longer did I deem clean lines and primary colours as base and degraded. Rather, I saw them as everything, from the tiniest sparks of a unicorn filly to planets, galaxies and even the infinite realm of quantum mechanics which was all the vogue back then. That was a new nature, truly infinite and thought-provoking, and I’ve been painting in this form ever since. My first work after returning home, of two white lines and three red fields, became my cutie mark.