My story and the rediscovery of the passions that gives meaning and color to my life

Reykjavik, February 18, 2022

My drawings, my story

I was born and raised in a small town in Romanian Transylvania. From an early age I expressed a strong predilection for graphic and plastic arts, which I somehow gave vent to during my adolescence, attending in a disorderly fashion drawing, painting and sculpture courses at the Art School of Zalau, and, above all, that essential atelier of shapes, colors, smells, tastes and sounds that was the whole world around me.

The whole world: the gray and stale panorama of the city, as well as the iridescent and bucolic landscape of the countryside. The city brutalized, saddened by the urbanization of the Soviet period: with the yellow gas pipes running on the sidewalks; the buildings with malformed roofs, the pathetic lace curtains on the windows without shutters and the balconies closed by slender and shaky plexigas verandas that claim to relieve the sad daily claustrophobia allowing a few more square meters indoors; the shaggy flowerbeds and the garbage out of the cans because that is where the gypsies do their daily shopping; the outdated industrial complexes and the partially decommissioned steel mill just across the street in front of the house, at whose entrance so many times as a child I was desperately looking for a father who did not want to be found …

And the countryside: my grandparents’ house, just outside the city, where I spent the summer months. Where the paw of modernity had not yet scratched so brutally on things and on people. Years later, I would have understood that advancing by bus into those streets more and more desolate and empty, it was just like slipping into a Chagall painting: my grandmother dressed in wool in all seasons, who, yes, some summer nights I believe I saw her keeping still in the sky, above the little house and in front of the garden, watching over our sleep and chatting with God and the stars; the ducks, the mud, the cows the pigs the honey, the tools and the arid men; and the fish caught with bare hands in the brook and the frogs hidden in my cousin’s pockets to spite him; and all that kaleidoscope of incessant, continuous, yet never disturbing sounds and noises, which in nature never make you be alone, even when you think you are.

I didn’t have an easy childhood or youth. My parents were sons of peasants who moved to the city to work in what was at that time one of the largest steel mills in the area. I was the eldest child and my memories of happy family are limited to faded images I remember or maybe just I imagine I remember, of when I was not yet five years old. Then the memories, which at this point are such, change into a plot that would not disfigure in a novel by Agota Kristoff. Other colors, other sounds. The dry hiss of the belt that cuts through the air and slams hard against the back. Someone’s back, in the enclosure of our four walls. It doesn’t matter who: everyone was suffering, each in their own way, including who giving the beltings, for he wouldn’t have done that, otherwise. The parties, the revelry of the adults and the excited children in the middle and then, all of a sudden, the vermilion of the blood splatters on the kitchen wall, the drunken screams and the aunt’s tooth rolling on the floor. My parents divorced soon and the postwar period was not much better than the war. All in all a classic and widespread script but not for this less painful: after the palpitation, after the insane and obscene excitement of family violence fueled by dissatisfaction, communication difficulties, sloppiness and a lot of alcohol, it comes the cold, introverted, frigid poverty a lonely woman with two little daughters to raise.

The Soviet era was over, 1989 had passed for a few years, but we were still facing that stale and a little depressing daily life that we find in the books of Milan Kundera or Hrabal. There was no money. There was no heating. The water for washing was heated on the stove and most evenings dinner consisted of a few slices of lard and little else. I didn’t dream of a different life, though. Oh, no, I wanted it. I have always had, from an early age, the strong, unassailable awareness that was not that my condition. I wanted tomatoes for dinner even in winter; I wanted pineapple and bananas after lunch (expensive foods out of our reach at that time). I wanted the elegant dresses of wealthy ladies. I wanted to play tennis. But it wasn’t just the capricious claims of a difficult child. In my child head, that rich materiality that I so desired was associated with that category of people who somehow participate in an everyday life in which there is a natural sense of beauty, a certain cultural level, an education and a way of life where the aesthetics of things dissolve and mingle with the aesthetics of the spirit; where thoughts, ideas and high speeches pervade everyday life. Somehow I didn’t feel belonging to the poor world of my family.

Of course, nowadays for all of us wealthy Westerners it is common to think that culture, polite manners, elegance, are not necessarily the exclusive prerogative of a wealthy and rich social class. However, it is an incontrovertible fact that poverty, economic hardship and poor material conditions make it much more difficult to access. And this is all the more true in a collectively poor society with an low civic sense, as was the Romanian one at the time. In my still rather limited horizon there was therefore a somewhat classist vision of society in which access to beauty and “high” things was the privilege of the wealthy class (which was basically the actual state of affairs in the West until the advent of global wellbeing in the 1900s).

I was still a child (well a little capricious, that’s true), and I became convinced that in some previous life I must have lived in a noble family, in a castle. And I wanted it back. Together, of course, with all that high and beautiful world, in the most broad sense, of which fate, who knows why, had defrauded me. I was lucky, because nature (fate, God, call it what you want) had allowed me to see clearly since the very young age what the American psychoanalyst Hillman calls the “acorn”, that is our natural vocation, that natural inclination that we have inside since birth, what we really want and know how to do, and that when we do it we feel at ease.

Some discover their acorn only just partially, others with difficulty; someone never, clouded by the daily tasks or by the priorities imposed by a social system to which we adhere against our will, often unconsciously: an octopus from which it is very difficult to extricate oneself, of which it is difficult even to be aware. Thus, few have the luck and the ability to develop their own acorn and make it grow, allowing it to become the oak in which each acorn can potentially evolve.

My acorn was for me, first of all, to redeem myself from that low world and not get stuck in a poor everyday life, especially in a human, cultural, emotional, civic and, why not, spiritual sense.

Certainly the genetic component contributes to the definition of one’s acorn; and in turn the acorn shifts our attention and focus to certain circumstances of our life rather than others. Wasn’t my father’s visceral vitality after all a desperate cry of desire, a desire to be on the upper floors, to access the hanging gardens of the social building? My father loved company, he loved to surround himself with friends to party with and enjoy being together. Although his emotionality was often overflowing into an impulsiveness that he could not control, ending sometimes in outbursts of gratuitous malice or violence, underneath there was a good man. Too much under, unfortunately. But he was my world: my desire for life clung to him, despite everything. Though he was gone, and he was no longer looking for us, stubbornly, I was looking for him and I didn’t hate him. My Daimon (fate, God, call it what you want…) was guiding and instructing me; my acorn was desperately looking for water to grow.

It was my father’s sister (yes, the one with the splattered tooth) who helped me to finish the high school, with some money and a lot of confidence, also helping me to insert here and there, secretly from my mother, some art course with which I tried to look out the window of a world a little less squalid than that made up of poor shopping and slices of lard in the evening. There was no money even for food, let alone for books. University was not for us … But my acorn? My aunt helped me as much as she could, and I enrolled in the Faculty of Economics in Cluj-Napoca, despite my mother’s amazement. It goes without saying that these were difficult and lean years, literally. Pressed by the priority of completing my studies as soon as possible and making independent from a family who could not support me, my artistic ambitions soon took a back seat and I didn’t think about them anymore. My head didn’t think about it anymore…my unconscious obviously yes, in her way: my belly knew very well what I liked and what I didn’t. But at that time I didn’t know listen her yet.

After graduating, a few months’ work experience at a local company convinced me to pack my bags and leave for abroad to broaden my perspectives, cultivate my skills, feed my ambitions. And most importantly, scrape a living.

I first moved to Spain, where I didn’t do much, and soon in Italy. Here, despite ups and downs and significant differences in character, I consolidate a couple relationship that began some time before, during my first work experience in my homeland. For a few years I earn my living by working in a finance company, and I doze off in the placid provincial life of the wealth Lombard region in Northern Italy. Over time, work took more and more space in my life, which was overall proceeding without too many question marks, under the collective hypnosis of the working week, weekend getaways, and about twenty days off a year.

In this climax, an unexpected event, and with hindsight beneficial, changed the cards on the table. The company I was working for suddenly closed due to legal and corruption issues and I found  myself at home from one day to the next. Suddenly facing empty and silent days was like coming out of a dream and entering a nightmare. The sound of a midweek day spent alone inside the walls of your home is so different from that of a public holiday! The patter of the postman, the chatter of children returning from school, the vacuum cleaner of the neighbors’ maid did nothing but make more evident the sadness of that urban silence and of that time that I did not know how to take back. We had a piano in the living room, but I didn’t know how to play it. Playing the piano was one of those things I wanted so much to do as a child. But I didn’t. What had I been doing all this time? What was I able to do? What I didn’t know how to do but wanted to? We had some paintings hanging on the walls. Now I had time to make one too. But I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how! I didn’t even have brushes. Why? I felt the same anger I had as a child and realized that now was the time to take it all back. All. Again.

I began to attend drawing and painting courses in the area, and soon became an assiduous student of those who were my masters of the years to come: Cristina Treccani’s Atelier CreaArt, Amos Vianelli, Gabriella Piardi, Michela Bogoni.

My acorn was not dead, but it was close. I resumed watering it day after day, with care and dedication. Slowly, like a dehydrated man who has to start drinking again a little at a time. I got closer to a dimension made of emotionality and humanity, intuition, artistic interests. And curiosity about all the colors of the world around me, just like when I was a child.

I have a fondness for the pastel on wood, a technique for which I discovered an unexpected propensity and familiarity. I also work with charcoal on wood and oil on wood or canvas. The subjects range from the reproduction of photographs, paintings or natural landscapes, to personal creations.

I love to produce small series of works united by the theme or subject, spacing from a wide-ranging thematic affinity to a hypnotic sequence of variations on the theme. This led to the pastels that glorify the basic foods of human civilization, represented in a nostalgic atmosphere of intimate peasant naturalness (bread, beer, milk, cheeses), or to the sequence of African faces adorned with only leaves and fruit, which force us to take note of the substantial congruity between the two apparently antithetical dimensions of aesthetics and spirituality, to remind us that, today no less than yesterday, form is substance.

In the meantime, my husband, who has always been sensitive to the dichotomy between mental-rational and emotional-intuitive thinking, also began to mature and become aware of a growing sense of unrealization. When we become aware of a state of things on an inner and emotional level, beside the mental and rational level, our unconscious attention is activated and we become more receptive to situations, events, opportunities around us that may have a relevance with our state. Four years ago, with a bit of courage and convinced that it was the right time to listen more to our “belly” than to our “head”, without thinking twice we took an opportunity that brought us to Iceland. Within a month, we emptied the house and got rid of three-quarters of the things we owned, gaining a sense of regeneration and liberation that amazed us first.

Starting almost from scratch in the Far North has helped to definitively resolve the stalemate by opening new perspectives and awareness. I have developed and deepened interests in the field of regressive therapy and mental reprogramming, which I now cultivate and nurture hand in hand with my interest in painting. Here I took lessons from Guðfinna Hjálmarsdóttir (Litir og Föndur, Reykjavik). The peculiar Icelandic landscape offers great inspiration and unique and intriguing scenarios. From our living room window I can see the clear, deep orange sunsets slowly laying out like long sheets across the low Reykjavik horizon. And, if they feel like it, the gods set up a dancing evening of kaleidoscopic auroras under the sheets and above our heads.

Another professional pirouette will take us to Finland in a few months. But this is a canvas still to be painted…