Pages of Art that brings back memories.
Eight years old and a gift from Dad: a huge collection of essays with a white hard cover. About Impressionists.
What a gift! I also had a hard time holding it in my hand. It had very long chapters and many images. No woman. But great art pages.
This news had alarmed me enough.
Beloved Renoir almost everywhere in the pages and then drew him hundreds of times … and my thoughts at that time:
–I will never be able to paint like that.
–Another era that no longer exists, they managed to become great artists, as I do in this microscopic city of the south and moreover woman?
I remember these dark thoughts of mine with precision. As a child I was very pessimistic, I admit.
*I will never be able to paint like that-I said.
I was bored, I didn’t like anything, and above all I didn’t see a future.
But that pages touched something inside me.
First of all it was a gift from my father.
Then it was that specific gift, the one that touches your deep ropes. I thought, …but then my father perceives that I want to be an artist.
This thought made me feel important.
I would flip through it all the time and obsessively observe the details.
I also discovered that yes, there was a woman, Berthe Morisot. And that touched other parts of my heart, even though she wasn’t my favorite.
Since those eight years and that book, a lot of time has passed and the Impressionists are no longer in the top ten of my favorite artistic movements.
The Impressionism taught me to observe light with dust and pollen, they taught me to amaze colors during the day. There was no black for the Impressionists, but a multitude of colors that mixed with great observation of nature, could reveal unknown worlds.
My first love, Renoir, at one point travelled in parallel with Van Gogh and the latter prevailed with his burning passion for life in my adolescence. For this reason, the Impressionists no longer provoked the shivers that I had in my eight years of age.
In the image you see here, there is the portrait of my mother that I made 4 years later, at twelve years old.
I found it in the move of my parents’ house.
It’s a blue sheet of smooth cardboard and I used very pasty wax crayons.
Here is a middle way is a line of passage between my loves of which I have spoken to you.
The Impressionists, with their hair composed of a mix of gray and white and blue (to make my mother’s black hair) and Van Gogh in the fuchsia features of the collar of the shirt, stretched out with determination is a violence a little restrained.
The Pages of essays and art novels that I received in those years did not have the same impact as the first book on the Impressionists.
I then learned that the women impressionist painters were there and at least remember in addition to Berthe Morisot also Mary Cassatt (which I preferred to Morisot) and Camille Claudel. And who knows how many others, because the history of art should be rewritten.
Yet today, when I put together the shelves of the bookcase and found that book of art again, the past merged with the present.
I thought about my father, about that gift and I saw everything again as a sign: I’m here now, and I’m doing what seemed impossible to me.
Sometimes emotions eat your heart and even memories become too big. It’s all wonderful, it has the taste of destiny that smiles at you.
