The Long Way Home

The way is even longer if you are not sure anymore where that “home” is… Is it your birthplace, your native town and country? Or is it where your family, your children and grandchildren are?

Right now I am in Quebec, working my arse off to gather some $ so that I can return in Sibiu, Romania and take care of my old, alone now that my mother passed away, father or 85… drawing, painting is almost impossible right now… Here in Quebec at least…

Danu & Miki, alias Mike

In June I will go back, and make, probably for the last time in this life, the voyage to my native land. And back to Quebec at a time I cannot even fathom…The only rejoicing thought is that in Sibiu I will be able (not being a 9 to 5 corporate sclave anymore) to draw, to paint, to photograph, to write, maybe… From time to time, at least…

And, of course, I hope to be more present and more active on the net, in the blogging world and on Fine Art America…

Maybe I could even fulfill my destiny (if destiny it is) as an artist. Who knows?

Army Stuff and More

My mother died recently, at 87. I’m staying with my father now, trying to make his life easier, in my old hometown of Sibiu, Translyvania.

Going through old books and photos I’ve found a 37 year old sketchbook with my drawings from the army. I was a regular soldier for 18 months in Lugoj, Banat. A nice little town I liked very much since a lot of things were just like in Sibiu. I didn’t liked the army but I loved my time in Lugoj, in the spare moments…

To my surprise, almost all the drawings are portraits, some quite good, all interesting, for me, the present day me. I kept a journal and it seems that doing portraits was one of my main interests then as it is now… Danu the Portrayer… I forgot, truly, that my “vocation” , my interest in portraying humans, was so old… I shouldn’t be that surprised but I was, and pleasantly surprised… It seems I’m capable of some perseverence and coherence, after all…

Here are some of this drawings, starting with some self portraits.

Here are some other portraits, usually army friends, sergeants or such…

And this was my army barack…

A satiric sketch…

In fact, in the last few months of my service, there was almost a kind of a vie de bohème, our political officer forming a group of “artists” (myself  being one of them and the host, I was also the librarian of the unit). We did only drawing and painting for the last 2-3 months, painting all kind of kitsch stuff for the officers and a different kind of kitsch (political) for the “Cantarea Romaniei” (a patriotical-political artistical contest, very specific for the communist times)… We slept there, some on old piles of newspapers, some in huge baskets like the one in which my friend Dascalescu slept (and I draw him)…

And an expresion study of the same…

My drawing skills weren’t so bad 37 years ago, were they…

Getting it, in an odd way…

Life is kind of funny. Well, funny, as when you speak about a mad person in order not to hurt the feelings of friends & relatives…

I will start painting and drawing again (almost for sure) because my mother (87) got sick and her and my 84 old father need my help and assistance. So, I am now in my old country, in my old native town Sibiu (Transylvania) and since I am needed to stay here almost permanently and, from time to time, I even have some spare time I will start to draw and paint again… Life is funny that way… You can find good things in bad ones and bad things in good ones. Reality never seems to be pure, bad or good in only one way. Mixt up, fluid, always changing…Funny…

For the moment, I’m just preparing my things. Bought some watercolor paper, washed my old brushes, established the spot where I will create my future masterpieces in my parents kitchen… Never touched a paper or canvas in the last…oh, must be, maybe, 9-10 months now. Like with a baby, I feel that delivery is at hand…

Of course, there are some inconvenients: to stay here in Romania beyond my legal measly 1 week paid vacation and 1 months of unpaid vacation, I will loose my credit, my car, my job (I am sure some clients of Chatr will regret my bariton, kind voice…) and I will badly miss my grandchildren, children and wife but, well, I will take care as much as possible of my old parents and, yes, I will paint again. Je ne regrette rien, as used to say Edith Piaf…

Even bad things happen for a good reason…

Longing for It

This morning I have my first drawing & painting dream… I was beginning (preparing) to draw\paint portraits, at a big table, with people arround… And the dream was very intense, combined with the presence of my first crush from school, when I was 12-14 years old (and even before), a delicate but sportive blonde, with green blue eyes, called Ica (short from Sophia, Sophica)… She is now somewhere on The East Coast, new York, maybe… kind of rejected me when I was a shy, insecure adolescent, then reappeared here and there in my life… paths crossing… (I ended loving & marrying a brunette with very blue eyes; still together after 32 years, on and off, 3 children and 2 grandchildren away… but drawing & painting is an even older love…)

Because, even if I consider myself a reasonable, rational person, in fact, I am, like everybody else, driven more by hunches, gut feelings (“hara” they call it in Japan)  and heart made decisions (some of them not even on a conscious level), I believe this dream is a good omen. A GOOD OMEN.

I add this last sketch of a painting, my about last (well, let’s better say, the most recent) painting…

unfinished painting?

The word to describe the feelings I had during this dream is a Romanian word we are very proud of: “DOR”. The closest translation is “longing for…”  nostalgia, or, as we spell it sometimes, à la Russe, as in Tarkovsky’s movie, NOSTALGHIA… Kind of a searing, but sweet, pain… for a thing in our past.  And that’s how I feel about drawing & painting… But there are, maybe, good omens…

I Wonder…

Almost 6 months now since I’ve ceased to draw and paint. I begin to wonder if painting, art, really was so important, so vital to me. Not a pleasant thought, after all… I’ve really believed, for a long time, I was an artist. Even created a few drawings and paintings which aren’t that bad…Some are quite good…

But now, after almost 6 months of letting go of drawing and painting in the backyard of my mind, I wonder… Am I an artist? Is there anything in me that makes painting and drawing more important than anything? Or am I just another Technical Support Consultant (imagine that!) for a corporation, trying to make a living in my final years ?

Maybe it’s the disappointment, the frustration, the hurt that nobody “discovered” me, that no bloody Maecenas  come forward with, at least, a modest offer, to recognize my “genius”… Never mind…

I begin to like the routine of an ordinary life… No intellectual highs, just the “telly” with some good or bad series, a good movie now and then and an occasional book I read in 2-3 more time than I use to… Maybe I am simply getting old…

Or, maybe, just maybe, I am “pregnant” / impregnated with something…Maybe I wait my term, the 9th months, to deliver… I wonder…

The Vanished Van Gogh

It takes no doubt some very big intellectual “cojones” to reveal a Vincent Van Gogh like the one Steven Naifeh & Gregory White Smith just did, relative recently, by publishing ” Van Gogh:The Life”. This book goes a long way against the tide, against the legend and conventional myth of Vincent Van Gogh. Of course, the myth admits Vincent was a “mad” genius (and essentially, he was, but the accent is on GENIUS not on mad…) but the way the 2 authors extend the madness to, practically,his whole life is, to say the least, unusual, singular.

A weirdo from the beginning to the end, a maniac, a paranoid, quarrelsome, sometimes generous, sometimes blatantly ungrateful human being, the Naifeh & Smith’s Vincent is quite an unpleasant person to deal with. Failure after failure are minutiously described, with an almost scientific accuracy. And these 2 authors are very convincing. Not that they are lirically passionate (like so many of the authors that made a sentimental, often edulcorate myth of the “mad genius” Van Gogh…) They are more like the enthomologist looking with a “manic” (a word they use quite a lot!) attention at an interesting bug through a microscope… Of course, they already exercised this kind of  “focus” on Jackson Pollock, another genius with mental problems…

For me, a fan of Vincent Van Gogh for more than 40 years, it is kind of paradoxically funny, to sing the praises and pay and hommage to them, the 2 guys who ruined “my” Van Gogh for me. For I cannot close my eyes and see “MY” hero Vincent anymore. Vanished.

As I am about to finish my reading of their brick of a book (which I start to read from the end – the fishy “suicide”, Naifeh & Smith variant – and now I will finish in the middle…) “my” Vincent is there no more, lost and vanished. I suppose, even our personal myths grow old, wither and die…

What is still here? Well, it is “their” Vincent, a troubled, bizarre, too passionate (with a short fuse and a short – if intense – flame), paranoid, impossible to live with, mad (truly and ugly mad, from the beginning, and not conveniently romantically mad like in the Hollywood movies…) human being. I’m not a psychiatrist but, if I were, probably I would have diagnosed his sickness as Borderline Personality Disorder, a mental illness which was not in the books back in the 1890 ties… (May the Lord forgive me the sin of adding yet another dilettante diagnosis of Vincent’s sickness! I just couldn’t help myself, for very personal reasons…)

Eventually, their Vincent proves to be quite an unglamourous figure. A sad, unhappy, difficult being. Difficult to deal with. And if there was, no doubt, a lot of suffering involved, the most of it was self inflicted, the result of his mental sickness.

Van Gogh, for me, is NOT a hero and a model anymore. At least not as a person. Oh, boy!

Of course, his body of work is still there, his letters, his drawings, his paintings. Not all of them are masterpieces (even if treated as such by the Auction Houses; but then, did you looked at that little horror of a Scream by Munch they sold for 120 millions or such?!) but the inevitably few who are…well, those sunny, colorful, a la prima, perfect paintings and drawings they do for sure tip the balance in his favor. Maybe it was God’s scope to make him the way he was and give him so much unhappiness and pain. So that he can draw and paint those awesomely happy, luminous and colorful images that are now a part of our everyday life. Those masterpieces – the pure essence of a life so full of failure and self – inflicted sufferings – are redeeming. More than enough to tip the balance from Vincent, the madman, to simply “Vincent”. “Vincent”, the way he signed his paintings. Vincent, the genius.

I Am Too Old For This Shit

La Bohème, la vie d’artiste, for the moment I will set that aside. As you can read in my title, I really am too old for this shit… 20 years older than Vincent at the moment of his death. I’ve tried and will still try to go on and finish what I can, I know this is just a phase and maybe, one day, if I’ll live, the nostalgia of an artist life, the urge to draw and to paint could come back with a vengeance. But for now, I will just stay (literally) on my arse 8 h per day, helping clients of Chatr to Talk Happy… It will pay the bills…

What can I do? No Mecena offered to do for me what Theo did for Vincent or Ambroise Vollard for Gauguin…

Painting, art, literature, will still be with me and I’ll even try to write a blog post here and there, when a lonely idea will traverse my head, full of the ” sound and the fury” of so many voices…

Here it is a kind of farewell photo, something to match the famous “Self portrait of Vincent On The Way to Tarascon” (the painting destroyed during Dresden bombardment, at the end of WW2):

Danu, on the Zen Path, near the Nation’s Lake, Sherbrooke, Quebec.

I’m kind of old and kind of tired but if some not so probable Mecena will point out his/her nose  and insist that I finish my body of work…well…we’ll see then…

So, farewell for now, my few friends. You, at least, keep up the good work…