I had already painted numerous layers on a large quadripartite artwork. I turned it upside down several times and rearranged the different parts. For several months, the large canvases took too much space in my studio but I just couldn’t finish the work. Until at the end of October I had a dream about trees with their roots being torn out of the ground in an enormous storm. The trees were like dancers yielding to the forces of nature. As I was painting the tree trunks from my dreams, hurricane Sandy hit New York killing 40 people and creating a chaos that shut down the entire city. The following spring the painting was on view in my art exhibitions in Washington, and Americans kept taking selfies in front of it, intrigued by its history.