All the dreams in the world (Original)

A rolled canvas on a small apartment floor in Graça. Photographs, postcards from the Thieves’ Market, yellow façades, blue-framed windows. This painting began with the Lisbon around me and Fernando Pessoa’s Tabacaria running through it: the distance between an ordinary life and all the dreams it contains.

Completed in Estoril, it carries the losses, movement, and discoveries of 2024–25. An easel holds an unfinished canvas. A figure is in pain. A red-haired café patron watches from a window, having found her way into the painting and declined to leave. The teal sofa, globe lamp, and balcony rail belong to a particular room and a particular time.

Layer by layer, the room became a record of what I was living through. The curtain holds the boundary between what the painting reveals and what it keeps.

Also available as a print

Shop All the dreams in the world — the print →

Read the story behind the painting: Behind the Curtains →

Some paintings arrive fully formed. Most do not. They accumulate — over months, over versions, over what you see, what you feel, what you lose.

Every version of this painting is present in the final one. Every person placed there and then painted over is still there — breathing under the surface, behind the curtain.

I'm nothing. I'll always be nothing. I can't want to be something. But I have in me all the dreams of the world.
— Fernando Pessoa, Tabacaria

The curtain in the painting is not decoration. It is a threshold — between what is shown and what is kept. Between the public painting and the private grief.

Original painting · Mixed media on canvas · 3ft × 4ft · Estoril, Lisbon · 2026
By Satish Prabhu

The stories behind this painting →

📝 Behind the Curtains: A Final Painting — The full journey of this work

📝 My Croatian Awakenings — Plein air sketches that kept the artistic fire alive

📝 Fernando Ferros & Pyramids — Travels that fed the creative process

An original artwork by Satish Prabhu, created through his own studio practice. An artist-made work, not an AI-generated image.