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06/16/2006: "Waiting" by Jose Freitas Cruz
All is quiet on the art centre front and I’m at the studio, waiting. A good deal of time goes by waiting: waiting for the acrylics to dry on paintings that lie scattered about the studio; waiting for the next move to emerge in my mind’s eye from the dialogue I hold with them; waiting for the moment when the peak is reached inside me – the one that rescues me from my fear of destroying everything I’ve done up to now and execute the gesture I had a preview of and practiced in my head while I waited. Quite often, irrelevant ideas pop up in my mind in those apparently idle moments. Mundane worries calling for a solution and inclusion in my schedule, echoes of a conversation with friends and the ensuing mental dialogue of things imagined and left unsaid. Here at the studio most everything gets solved and nothing is left unsaid, while I wait.
You may not know this but most of you have been here. I bring you here on those days when the blogs and comments you post make me want to tug you along to continue the debate. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, therefore, if I tell you that our ‘inner conversations’ sometimes lead me to the solution I was looking for in a painting. Our acquaintance may be ethereal but you become very real and present in my head in those moments while I wait.
Sometimes the waiting settles in for a longer spell - the path ceases to be clear, fear keeps me from taking the next step forward [It is always forward even if it feels backward, but I can’t experience it as such because the path suddenly goes fuzzy. It is only in hindsight, mostly while I’m waiting, that I understand that the mistakes I made moved me forward, never when I’m right in the middle of it.] This is usually the case – the longer spells of waiting - when a theme is worn-out and no new direction has opened up through some fortunate mistake. I’ve still a long way to get there.
But when it does happen I let the pressure ease off. I go for a walk through the narrow streets of Lisbon, visit a museum, get things done on the computer, read and comment on the odd blog, go out for a coffee with a good book and my writing pad… or, if the previous years have been good years, I give-in to my wanderlust and go somewhere far. The aborigines call it to ‘go walkabout’ but I doubt my wanderings could ever carry me that ‘deep’, we’ve lost the access to our songlines – over millennia we have wilfully neglected them in exchange for the knowledge that allows us to fly to the moon or meet on this screen.
But I sometimes like to fool myself into believing that I’ve come close to some measure of depth and, perhaps not surprisingly, such moments almost always come about when I least expect them… while I’m waiting.
I remember one such occasion, eleven years ago [before the earthquake in 2001], I happened to be in Bhuj, killing time before moving north to the Himalayas. The series of paintings I had been working on was selling well but the prospect of completing more had started to leave me with a feeling of nausea and so I had taken myself to India one last time [at least for the time being] in the hope that it would trigger something new. But the thrill of getting there aside, Bhuj itself failed to live up to the tales fellow travellers had told me about and the main thing that had driven me there, the Great Rann of Kutch had been declared off limits to travellers because of the tension with Pakistan. I found nothing I could ‘feed’ on. I had exploited the colour and the vibrancy of my previous trips way beyond what I felt reasonable and I was looking for something more subdued yet powerful at the same time. The highlight of the day was roaming around the train and bus stations in the hope of getting out sooner by any possible means – the first available ride to Ahmedabad was in five days. There was no option but to wait.
I had grown weary of colour [never thought this to be possible] and for some time had seriously been contemplating attempting my own series of white paintings as therapy. But I needed a reason, a context [a crutch? an alibi?], and Bhuj looked like the last place on earth where I would find it. With three days to go my heart was no longer there and my mind had long since taken the road to the mountains, when suddenly events took that unexpected turn you can never make happen from your own side.
The bus was travelling north, further and further from things white, past scattered villages of mud huts, deeper into the expanses of a desert that is home to the tribes that are at the source of a migration we still know very little about despite their presence in Europe as far back as the 9th century – the Gypsies, or Roma as they call themselves. Obediently, I sat on the right-hand side like the man at the station told me: the police at the road-blocks rarely checked the buses from the traffic side of the road and I was ‘looking very Indian’, or so he said.
My plan was to travel to Khavda and return the same day. Nothing beats a long trip across unknown expanses, imagining what might be going on in the places in between where time seems to have stopped while mine whizzes past. But I was never to make it there and two hours later I was standing on the side of the road, smack in the middle of the Great Rann of Kutch, watching the bus disappear in the horizon while I felt time coming to a halt. The check-points were far behind me but I hadn’t counted on not getting past my travel companion.
I cannot recall his name, just as I’m sure he doesn’t remember mine - names were irrelevant to the friendship we struck back then – but I still feel the repercussion of that encounter to this day. He was an artist, a painter, travelling from Bombay to visit friends; he had tired of colour and was doing research for a series of white paintings!
I was speechless.
As soon as he heard my side of the story he started talking me out of going on to Khavda; there were things he wanted to show me, things that would set my imagination on a good track. We got off the bus in the middle of nowhere; the only distinguishable sign was a grouping of shrubs that interrupted the flow of tarmac towards nothingness. I usually trust the feeling I get in the gut and this looked like it mattered a lot to him, but I had to make an effort to suspend my disbelief and trust my guide as we walked deeper into a maze of shrubs and low-lying trees towards a small gathering of mud huts that emerged half an hour later.
We were greeted first by the children, and then we saw the women of the village going about their daily chores or sitting in the shade of their houses, all dressed in colourful embroidered outfits and wearing an array of bracelets and artefacts as if this were a special day. Their faces lit up when we approached, shining out against the greyish-brown mesh of huts and vegetation. As hard as I try I fail to find traces of white in those memories before events took an unexpected turn; the moment when my chaperone arranged for me to visit the inside of those immaculately clean huts and I felt as if lightning had struck. 
From this moment on whatever words I write to describe what I saw and felt risk sounding redundant and so I prefer to leave you with an image – an example of what I found on the inside. [I looked the picture up on the internet to give you a clue. I took no photographs inside their homes, some things and situations are beyond a ‘click’ and I refuse to debase the moment; I prefer to register them in my mind – the images and experience are still vivid there, in a place I can easily access while I wait.] 
[instalation view: the towers of endless silence - acrylic on canvas 1996]
