Memorycemetery

 “I am one of the forgotten ones who refuses to be forgotten.” -M. O’Reilly

Once I have heard a story about one Japanese painter. Unfortunately I do not know his name. Anyway, as far as the story goes, he started to paint rather late, like Van Gogh, in his early thirties. Soon he abandoned his job and commited all his life to painting. He lived long and died in his eighties. He never married or had any children, as he devoted all his life to his art. He produced a large body of works, well over 3000 paintings and countless sketches. He struggled most of his life, though in his late years he became very well known, and could sell his works well.

That’s not the point, though such a commitment deserves respect. What really fascinates me is the subject he had chosen: a coffee pot. He painted nothing else, but one and the same coffee pot for nearly 60 years.  After his death not a single sketch or painting with anything else but this pot was found. My first reaction to this story was laugh. How strange it was: to spend all your life doing nothing else but painting endlessly, over and over without a shadow of doubt or showing any interest in a different subject same object, a coffee pot. I thought he didn’t have any imagination, or was caught in the frame of his routine. I know some people who never ventured as far as 50 kilometres away from the place there they were born; they were fine with that and didn’t see any point in going somewhere else. Was he like them? Or maybe he could see something else in that pot every time he would paint it? Was his life a quest for perfectness? What was in this pot for him, and why he had chosen a coffee pot anyway?

I wanted to find answers, but more I thought about him, more questions I had. I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I wish I could find an album of his paintings. It is my dream for a long time, but I couldn’t come across it. They told me there’s one, compromising all his life span and works. I imagine a very thick folio, few thousands pages thick, each of them depicting a coffee pot. I long to leaf through those pages, from his first drawings to the last unfinished work. I want to solve this mystery. Some people say, I’d love to meet Jesus Christ or Buddha, or have a chat with Lao-Tse, Pope or Leonardo da Vinci. If I’d have a chance, I’d like to meet this Japanese painter, whose name I don’t know and whose paintings I’ve never seen.

Boris Kislitsin

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