[Previous entry: "The Cable Guy"] [Next entry: "Inspiration"]
08/17/2006: "Time and Art" by Jose Freitas Cruz
Most, if not all, the paintings of the white series I mentioned in the last blog have stories that bind me to the people who bought them and help keep both the painting and the person present in the continuum I call My Life. One such story concerns a lady who showed up at the gallery towards the end of the first week and lingered on until I took the paintings down. She was particularly struck by a piece titled ‘The Labyrinths of Happiness’ and the little hand-made booklet that hung alongside it with the equivalent chapter from the larger text ‘The Bridges of Utopia’ that I had written for the exhibition. In those days I made a point of spending each and every day of an exhibition at the venue and so she and I got to speak quite a bit about the labyrinths of happiness and the bridges of utopia. She asked me, for instance, if I believed I could find my way more easily because I had been to India and Tibet. I answered no, and that, regrettably, a great many people believe this to be so and thus become stuck in a new and more dangerous labyrinth. But this isn’t what this blog is about.
A few weeks later I found out that this nice lady had bought the painting - the gallery owner called me up and asked me if I could deliver it to her personally at her new apartment. She was still in the process of moving in, there were only a few effects and I helped place my painting on the wall she wanted it on, with the afternoon glow bringing out things I hadn’t yet seen in it myself. She treated me to tea and we spoke further. She was well into her sixties, she had been a dedicated wife and seen her children through a decent education and on to a good job and now she wanted time for herself. Alone, and in peace. She was intent on seeking her way through the labyrinths of happiness, she said. We spoke for hours. My painting, she said, revealed many paths she had not yet dared explore. Believe me when I say this means more to me than the money I got – ten years down the road I can’t remember what the money afforded me and yet this moment lingers on intensely. But this, also, is not what I want to talk to you about.
One year went by and I received a mysterious call from a young man wishing to speak to me about a painting of mine he had seen, he said very little else but the calmness in his voice caught my attention. I wrote down the address without thinking much of it but as I moved through the narrow streets of Lisbon it dawned on me that I was very close to the lady’s flat. The young man and his sister greeted me at the top of the stairs and ushered me into the living room where the same afternoon glow reflected off the painting. It was one of those moments when time stands still. Before they spoke I felt what our meeting was about. We had tea, we spoke for hours about how happy their mother had been in that last year, how she had decided to take decisions she had put on hold for too long, how they had travelled together to places she had always dreamt of going, done things she’d always wanted to do, and how she told them this had all to do with the painting. Her sudden passing away had been peaceful and happy.
This, I thought, is the reason I want to paint – to be able to do this as often as possible. Beyond its place (or not) in local art history, beyond marketing, beyond being the socially right thing to buy, something I had done had an effect on somebody else to the point of making a difference… and to the point of leading the next generation to want to let me know that it did. I think this is what I want to talk to you about.
Is this what we are striving to bring forth in our studios? Does our work have what it takes to survive the living? What becomes of it when the children of our patrons get their hands on it? Will it find a way into their homes? How long will it take before it ends up in some flea market? Will the old lady’s grand-grand-children remember her happiness?
I was far East when my mother passed away. And when I managed to meet with my brothers to sort out legal matters and sell the house there was barely enough time to put aside her belongings in storage until some later date when we could decide calmly what to keep, what to sell and what to give or throw away. If I mention such a private moment it is only because I caught myself trying to make some sense of the criteria that went into the sorting of different things. There were things of value, some because of the money, some because of the memories, there were useful things and not so useful things, and there were a lot of things that had ceased to have any purpose with her departure, as painful as this thought was to acknowledge.
The most difficult things to decide upon were a few paintings my mother had kept. My parents were no art collectors, my father’s job was too itinerant for us to acquire and move around too many belongings, besides, the houses he’d get with each new posting had sufficient art work. But my mother did keep a few paintings and objets d’art she liked and there was also an assortment of paintings and prints she didn’t particularly like but had never thrown away. We held on to my mother’s portrait by Hungarian artist Sonia Horvath, I kept two ‘nature mortes’ of partridges and pheasants I can trace back to happy moments in my grand-father’s dining room and I put aside a seascape painted by a renowned Portuguese artist way back when he was 14 years old [not so much because I’m in love with it but because, well… he’s renowned and I couldn’t just chuck it out, now could I?]
But what of the other paintings? Why didn’t they withstand the test of me or my brothers? Why was their life cut short – or at least put on hold until they find someone who loves them further? Surely they too must have once had an old lady who felt happiness being around them.
If you don’t reach the iconic stature, when does the light die out? when does the happiness wither away? And if you do reach the iconic standing is it really the light and the happiness that live on or have you somehow turned into a golden calf?
