About the Cover Artist

Painter and award-winning novelist Enrique Flores-Galbis was born in Havana, Cuba. In 1961 he left Cuba, with Operation Pedro Pan, arriving alone in South Florida at age 9. His second book, 90 Miles to Havana, was based on childhood experiences that tested his resilience and ability to adapt to his new home in the US.

Before being diagnosed with Parkinson disease in 2014, Enrique was a portraitist and landscape painter. As tremors and loss of fine motor skill became more pronounced, he realized he no longer possessed the subtle touch required to lift a portrait from mere likeness to presence. Depressed, he put down his brushes, but not for long. His daughter, an art curator, convinced him to try another approach. After all, she reminded him, he had written a book about resilience and adaptation. First, Enrique changed his materials using shorter brushes and tubs of premixed paints, then his brushwork by stroking from the elbow and shoulder instead of the fingertips, and then his subject matter.

About his new paintings, Enrique says, “I need to see yellows and laughing blue forms lurching into vivid greens and purples, but never straying into grays. This is my momentary dopamine rush, more effective than anything a doctor can prescribe. It is what keeps me together.”

The cover painting, Apophenia, is the last in a series featuring a tightly woven thicket where a tiger lurks, well hidden. Looking closely at the first painting in the series Tiger, Tiger (above), you might find the tip of the striped tail, or an eye—and then the tiger emerges. In Apophenia, the tiger has disappeared, but the shapes and shadows in the foliage are left to suggest a threat that doesn’t really exist. This series evolved, in full view of current events, at a time when a frightening percentage of the population insists on seeing dangerous connections and meaning in things and events that are not really there.

Apophenia (/a-pə-’fē-nē-ə/) is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between seemingly unrelated things and events. At its best this tendency has enabled our ability to envisage God, electricity, and Jazz as well as saving us from hidden predators. At its worst it has given rise to delusional thinking and conspiracy theories that lead us down the wrong path.