A diploma for a Nobel Prize

Richard Vakil is an artist from Lysekil in Sweden. He is a self-taught artist who started to paint watercolour in the fall 1987. He acquired a taste for this technique thanks after teaching during summer time for seven years (1996-2002) at the Ljungskile Folkhøjskola.
Watercolour painting is his preferred technique, but he also uses acrylics.

During an exhibition in Stockholm in 2014, a woman who had bought a painting from him asked him if he would be interested in producing a diploma. He never dreamt she meant for the Nobel Prize! It was two years later that he was finally contacted by the Royal Academy of Sciences with a request to paint the diploma that is given to the Laureates of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.  He chose to paint stones, symbols of the immutable and eternal, on ARCHES^® Watercolour rough paper, 300 gsm, size 333 x 211 mm, to create the prestigious diplomas.

This is the text written on the card that accompanies the diplomas:

“Beyond the comprehension of eternity.
A stone – is it something constant, immutable in its environment, or is it a metamorphosis of its constituents: sand becomes stone, stone becomes sand?
I look at it and I ask: ‘Have you always been there?’

The stone replies: ‘No, I’ve always been constantly moving, with a consciousness that vanishes beyond the comprehension of eternity.’
What existed yesterday is something entirely different today.
The stone is a kind of eulogy to slowness and freedom.”