Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
PART I
The considered love for nature and the passionate intensity for what he did in his career made my father somewhat shelled. The unflappable way in which he made his drawings, almost as if he didn't touch the surface of the paper with his pen, completely quite and eager at the same time distracted me from my chores as I passed by the door of his studio which was left ajar and from which I stayed to observe him.
He was leaning forward on his drawing desk, sketching a picture off a biology textbook. The gray overwhelmed his head and of the side of his face little vessels of blood devoured his eyes. He turned around slowly and I hid half of myself frozen, still observing him, having been seized by his vacant gaze. There was a long distance between me and his desk which was completely isolated in a room that was otherwise barren and minimally decorated. I walked forward and my steps echoed like when you enter a cathedral in which the sound of each step mixes with the whispers of people's prayers. I climbed up the stool he was sitting on and he showed me the drawing he was making: it was the skeleton of wild cat, its naked interior eternally hissing. I was startled by the powerful contrast of the black ink against the grainy paper that he was using, the long traces of each bone, softly shaded. "This is how a cat looks inside," he said. I thought for a moment of the disparity of it and why hadn't he instead drawn something more matter of fact, a face, a pretty animal, a plate of fruit? why did he choose to draw the bone structure of a cat? It was, however, an excellent drawing with a symbolic connection to my father's spirit, which as a child I could sense. My concept of art was very immature then but whenever I entered my father's room I could almost touch the craquelures of what could have been a famous painting of some sort of religious iconography. Something unknown lied there, in that room, and even though my father and I never quite said much, and in fact remained in complete silence for most of the time, made me understand each one of his words, as they slowly crept out of his mouth.
There was a religious anguish in the things he said. As if he wasn't talking only to me but also to a God who hovered behind me. He was scared of approaching the definition of mortality and this is why this drawing made it more foreboding. Trying to find the deeper meaning of our feeble structure, of the structure of a cat. But as i said earlier, he loved nature deeply, he could observe the simplicity of the most unremarkable animal and give complete meaning to their existence and their importance in maintaining the harmony of the world we lived in. Frustrated as he was with other things like the difficult economy that weighed upon my family and the unfortunate incompatibility he had with my mother, he'd still gripped his subject patiently and minutely.
Perhaps it was the generous way in which the ink was distributed on each component of the animal. He enhanced the shading by illuminating the body from the right corner of his sheet of paper making the hind legs of his subject plunge darkly as if the skeleton was prepared to leap upwards towards the light that shined upon it. It was not that the creature had such realistic effect one could see it emerge of the surface, it was that the dimension that my father added to it made it more imprisoned within the the sheet of paper.
He was leaning forward on his drawing desk, sketching a picture off a biology textbook. The gray overwhelmed his head and of the side of his face little vessels of blood devoured his eyes. He turned around slowly and I hid half of myself frozen, still observing him, having been seized by his vacant gaze. There was a long distance between me and his desk which was completely isolated in a room that was otherwise barren and minimally decorated. I walked forward and my steps echoed like when you enter a cathedral in which the sound of each step mixes with the whispers of people's prayers. I climbed up the stool he was sitting on and he showed me the drawing he was making: it was the skeleton of wild cat, its naked interior eternally hissing. I was startled by the powerful contrast of the black ink against the grainy paper that he was using, the long traces of each bone, softly shaded. "This is how a cat looks inside," he said. I thought for a moment of the disparity of it and why hadn't he instead drawn something more matter of fact, a face, a pretty animal, a plate of fruit? why did he choose to draw the bone structure of a cat? It was, however, an excellent drawing with a symbolic connection to my father's spirit, which as a child I could sense. My concept of art was very immature then but whenever I entered my father's room I could almost touch the craquelures of what could have been a famous painting of some sort of religious iconography. Something unknown lied there, in that room, and even though my father and I never quite said much, and in fact remained in complete silence for most of the time, made me understand each one of his words, as they slowly crept out of his mouth.
There was a religious anguish in the things he said. As if he wasn't talking only to me but also to a God who hovered behind me. He was scared of approaching the definition of mortality and this is why this drawing made it more foreboding. Trying to find the deeper meaning of our feeble structure, of the structure of a cat. But as i said earlier, he loved nature deeply, he could observe the simplicity of the most unremarkable animal and give complete meaning to their existence and their importance in maintaining the harmony of the world we lived in. Frustrated as he was with other things like the difficult economy that weighed upon my family and the unfortunate incompatibility he had with my mother, he'd still gripped his subject patiently and minutely.
Perhaps it was the generous way in which the ink was distributed on each component of the animal. He enhanced the shading by illuminating the body from the right corner of his sheet of paper making the hind legs of his subject plunge darkly as if the skeleton was prepared to leap upwards towards the light that shined upon it. It was not that the creature had such realistic effect one could see it emerge of the surface, it was that the dimension that my father added to it made it more imprisoned within the the sheet of paper.
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