Memorycemetery

I have recognized my last posts have been pathetic. Probably it is because for me important is not what happened to me, but the thinking I am having at the moment. I shouldn’t hide myself behind though, as I am still not a pure thought. There’s no point in keeping a list of what I am and what I am not. We need to start somewhere anyway. So I am a painter, if I can separate being in personalities. I’ll better say, I am a painter too. Painting for me is a very personal thing. It is suffering, and a pleasure too. I struggle because it is never perfect, it is never as you expect it to be; and enjoy it for the same reason. That’s why it is a very personal. I always feel like being naked when somebody’s else sees my painting. They are the mirrors, so I mostly hide my paintings, as dog hides a bone and always feel shy to show them. I trace my life through paintings. These traces are of more importance and relevance for me than numbers detaining years. This thing happened when I was doing that painting, or in between of those ones. I am not very productive, because I paint when I feel like, and I feel different every day. As every painting has a story and every painting represents time, I want to flip through my archives and post paintings what I find with stories they belong to. If the collection of my posts is something what represents my life, I can’t make it complete without paintings anyway. It’s enough of explanations. As I wanted to write today about deeply personal matters, I will start from love.

Love (Portrait of Mayuko Ogawa, circa we just have met). Continue reading ‘Love’

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Many times I was about to sit and write a very personal memory: about my father; but every time something stopped me from doing that.

Death underlines life. If life is the sum of our memories and experiencies, where should be total. My first teacher taught me how to do it in primary school. Write numbers you want to add right under each other. When you put them all, draw a line and add numbers in each column. Under the line there will be one number, “total”. It’s easy to say, but not so easy to do when it comes to a life of somebody you know well. It’s amazing, actually, how scarce my memories are. He was a very kind and simple man. What I remember is just little things: my father caught just in his underwear on his way to toilet late in the night; his shaking hands when he hold my newborn son for the first time; he is sleeping on a sofa in living room, covering his face with a newspaper. Little, random and unsignificant memories. I remember him reading me his poems impromptu, or running around our house in a search for a pen. He would write his poems on anything: old receipts, shits of paper, newspaper clippings… he would leave them anywhere: you could find them in the kitchen, in the toilet, under the bed, on TV, on the floor, between book pages… He was a hardworking man, killing himself with a hell of a job (that was my first impression of it, when he took me there: hell, as he worked on a metal plant. Fumes, dirt, unbearable heat and red liquid metall running under the overpass he had to stay on long shifts). But he would always say: I’m a poet. Indeed, he was. I never was fond of his poems and everybody in my family annoyed by them, though. He, probably, didn’t have a talent, but there was no shortage of enthusiasm and commitment. He stuffed with his poems a pillow case, and then few shoeboxes, and then plastic shopping bags when he ran out of boxes. Nobody wanted to listen to him. Continue reading ‘Father’

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