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08/17/2005: "Back to Square One" by Jose Freitas Cruz
107 paintings – that was the figure on the bill-of-lading when we shipped our things out of Borneo two months ago headed for Lisbon where we are set to stay for the next four years. To see it written out was a bit of a surprise and it felt awkward somehow to have more paintings than anything else on that bill-of-lading. They weren’t all mine of course. My wife and I had bought two paintings from our good friend and fellow artist David Kelly, we had commissioned a portrait of our daughters from Chinese-Australian artist Shan Terry who had also joined in the Brunei Art Forum adventure before she left the enclave. While I was helping in the direction of a gallery I bought two works by my favourite Bruneian artist Zakaria Bin Omar entitled ‘The Wedding’ – one was of the bride, the other of the groom – and yet another by a Singaporean artist whose work I liked, Chew Lean Im. Then there was a canvas we found in a gallery in Alice Springs by Australian artist Tracie Morton (don’t know if she’s big or not, doesn’t really matter, the piece from a sugar-plum-dreaming series was what we wanted after wandering around the red centre during a trip down under) and the three small dot paintings we were unable to resist and bought off a wandering artist somewhere on the road between Darwin and Uluru (was he genuine? Again, does it really matter?)
This meant that 97 were mine. I don’t recall having that many paintings at hand anytime, ever. It meant of course that I hadn’t sold much in four years but it left me with a sense of accomplishment nonetheless [I don’t know if that is too many or too few. If too many I wouldn’t want you to think that I’m bragging; if too few I’ll take solace in the thought that I invested a good amount of my time and energy helping to boost the work of others in the otherwise culturally barren enclave of Brunei]. Actually, where sales are concerned I have no reason to complain, I sold more than I had anticipated. And to be entirely honest, not all 97 are completed paintings. A few – especially one of the boxes which I discovered this week to contain an extra 25 works on paper inspired by trips to Indonesia – require some sort of finishing touch before I let them be. In all I’ve got 53 finished pieces. Still, to my mind that is a lot. Dangerously so. After the fuss of settling everything over there and getting things organized over here my mind seems to be all too willing to heed to my body’s desire to do zilch.
Before we go any further however, let me situate you. Geographically, I’m back at square one, though on a slightly different plane [Professionally I’ve still to find out where things stand]. I will explain. Five years ago, faced with a prospect of the future that kept getting bleaker and bleaker my wife and I took a decision: we changed our lives… we took a leap in an unknown direction… there’s more than one way to describe what happened. Things had worked out reasonably well for the first ten years we lived in Portugal but we could foresee that Europe would not continue to be the same for much longer and our greatest concern was our daughters’ education. For my part I had taken on a position as artistic director of an art gallery to supplement my earnings as an artist and I found myself translating more and more books for a Lisbon publishing house because the steadier flow of cash seduced me - I was no longer finding the time to do what I had set out to do 15 years before. When my wife said she wanted to make an attempt at a job opportunity abroad there was really very little room for hesitation. We didn’t know where we would end up but we were certain that we wouldn’t be going very far if we stuck to the road we were on. In 2000 we moved to Berlin and one year later she got her first posting and we were off again to Brunei, the enclave from where I contributed my first blogs.
What’s the point of all this and what has it got to do with my paintings? If you bear with me a little longer I think I will be able to extract some sense out of this. As I said, this was a leap in an unknown direction… and we’re still moving.
The initial leap left me with a nagging sense of loss. Before the move I had completed a very successful exhibition and was starting to become visible in my homeland after 15 years of going at it independently. What would become of that? Loosing my studio of so many years and not having a place to work in Berlin didn’t help to motivate me much either, not to mention that the money during that first year in Germany was less than what we’d moved away from and so it happened that I found myself translating yet another book for my Publisher. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not complaining about the cards that had been dealt. I had work and I was grateful that I could continue to contribute to the family’s livelihood, but it felt as if I had lost an important chunk of what I thought made me up – conditions were bearable, it was the uncertainty about where the leap was taking me that started to undermine my confidence and eat away at the energy I had in store.
I forced myself to walk along and around OranienburgerStrasse venturing into galleries, leaving my portfolio and catalogues for them to consider but my heart wasn’t in it and it must have shown. I would become acutely aware of my condition whenever I visited Tacheles, an artists’ community on the corner with FriedrichStrasse while I waited for the girls to finish school and couldn’t muster up the will to talk to anyone or tell them that I was one of them – they had their own serious concerns and were facing eviction, something I felt was definitely more demoralizing and real than my occasional bouts of gloominess. I would wander aimlessly through the corridors of the battered building like a ghost. I felt like a ghost – that bit of me I mostly identified with was losing ground and I still wasn’t familiar with the new one that was meant to emerge from the leap. Would I still be an artist at the end of it all? How could I still call myself an artist if I couldn’t get myself to create the conditions to paint or exhibit and simply watched month after month slipping by? Was the new me meant to become a translator? Was I selling-out?
Deep down somewhere a little part of me insisted on taking notes and these notes, very often, were accompanied by sketches and ideas for future paintings. A future I wasn’t too sure was mine anymore – it held a vision that had been constructed by a me that I felt receding. Ich bin kein Berliner but Berlin is a tremendous place with lots to offer even if you don’t have enough time or money to enjoy it [I would often think twice before sitting myself down in a Kneipe for a beer. Coffee in a bistro watching the world go by, listening to samples of conversations with musicians and artists was a definite NO!] My favourite days were those nights when all the museums in town were open to the public, a wonderful idea that goes by the name Die Lange Nacht der Museen, The Long Night of Museums, and these were my oasis.
I won’t trouble you much longer with such tales. What followed is recorded in the blogs posted from the enclave. 363 days after moving to Berlin we were headed for Borneo where I woke up, kicked myself in the butt and created conditions to continue to paint and show my work… even though at the outset there wasn’t a single art gallery and hardly anybody to buy my work or even appreciate it.
And now, five years later, I am back where I started out. Geographically speaking, therefore, I feel I have come full circle. On a slightly different plane, as I said, because now my wife has a great job, I’m able to concentrate on my art and we’re able to afford the girls a decent education and the time to enjoy their company. It is professionally that I’m still not certain on what plane I have landed and this is what I intend to find out and write about in the next couple of blogs. Was the foundation I had laid down in those 15 years solid enough or have 5 years of absence completely eroded whatever power my paintings had over people in my community? Has the attitude of the major cultural agents towards me [institutions, galleries, sponsors, critics] changed or have I moved farther still from being accepted and must therefore continue to kick myself in the butt and carry on independently as I have done so far? Will I be able to concentrate solely on my work or will I be moved to organize things with others? What strategies might I apply to my benefit? What inspiration will I find coming back and seeing things as differently as I see them now? At this point I have more questions and doubts than all the paintings I’ve brought with me may help to appease. I have no laurels to sit on. I feel that it’s time to work… harder than ever.
