From the Dark to the Light.

“Because you're working from the dark to the light”, he explained.

I had asked him why the illustrations he used to send out as his New Years greeting cards were so dominantly black.
“It’s called the scrape board technique. You work on a cardboard that's covered with a thin layer of black ink over a ground of white chalk. You “draw” on this black surface with pen knives and needles, scraping away the black to bring out the white underneath.”

We had not seen each other for quite some time, and I never had had a chance so far to ask him about the picture. he had sent me at the end of 2001: the one with the broken bridge. It had shocked me when I first found it in the mail. That man in the picture, struggling to cross the gap in the bridge on a narrow board, high above what seemed to be a threatening abyss: What a strange picture to go along with the wishes for a happy new year. In fact I should have asked him why he had chosen such a somber motive for the occasion.

“Was it because of 9/11 of that year?”
“Not really. Even though I had used this as an excuse sometimes, when people asked me.” He referred to his answer to my first question when he continued:
“In fact the answer is the same here: I am working from the black to the light, when I create a picture. I sit, and I see nothing at first, sometimes for hours.”
Probably most of us who don't draw or paint professionally have sometimes wondered, where the pictures came from, in an artists mind.
“So you “sat”, as you say, and that bridge came to your mind?”
He might have suspected that I had some difficulties to understand what he wanted to say.
“Like something unveiling itself from the darkness, yes. Call it the darkness of the unconscious, if you want.”

Well, I thought, you do have some dark sides of your own, my friend. I was not alone to have wondered those past years about the dramatic changes in his life and attitudes. There was this second divorce in the background, we all guessed. It began around that time, when he drew that picture. In fact I had expected this as an explanation for it’s motive.

“It’s strange, even to myself, but it happened with quite a few of my pictures”, he continued after a long pause.
“I “find” them at a certain moment in time, not yet knowing what they mean.”
Another hesitation, like seeing something in a new light.
“And then, when I look at them again, and sometimes years later, I see the truth in them.” He was struggling now, to find the right words.
"Yes: they reveal a truth that was already there, when I created them, but still unknown to myself.”

“That man on the board, crossing the gap in the bridge, that was myself. I didn’t know it then, when I drew him. Like I didn’t know the true meaning of those waving hands in that other picture: That those good byes would go on for ever. I had seen them as something in the past, when I scratched them out of the scrape board.”

It was me now, who hesitated. Should I ask him about the picture with the little girls and the balls? – As if guessing my thoughts he said:
“It was the same, when I drew the girl playing with a ball and that other girl standing on that second ball on which another girl…”
He smiled, for the first time in our conversation. I remembered what he had told me about the meaning of this picture: A somehow fatalistic view of our lives being like a game in somebody else’s hands.
“The things I had told you about this picture and the events in my life that might have to do with it: I had no idea about them, when I scraped those lines in the board that brought the picture out to the light.”
"They revealed themselfs from the unconscious by the act of drawing?"
"From the Dark to the Light, yes."

*Posts in a Blog are usually displayed "the wrong way", with the first one at the bottom. That's why you find the two other pictures from this story in the following posts, with the first one in time at the end.

Life, a Game?

Now I remember why I still had a copy of that picture with the “waving hands"*. He had sent it to me with his New Year’s wishes for 1994. He kept that habit of sending out these illustrations, drawn by himself for the occasion, for quite a few years after. I may not have collected them all. But there was another one, from a later year, that seemed to belong to the same category of milestones in my friends life, as the picture with the waving hands. He was living alone by now but, as I guessed, in a continuation of the relationship that had made his second wife to want the divorce.
This time the picture showed a little girl, playing with a ball. And on that ball, one could guess, there was probably another little girl, playing with a ball as well. Because the first girl already was standing on a ball, thrown in the air by still another little girl’s hands. And all of this, somewhere in the universe. A puzzling continuity.

“You know”, he told me, later, “if we think to be the players in our lifes, it’s not really true.”

He paused, because he saw that I couldn’t grab his thought. “Like the little girl, we play our life’s game. What else can we do?”

“And you think that we are part of the game of others, or from the outside?”

I tried not to sound too sceptical, but his image left little room for actively taking one’s life in our hands. Didn’t we have free will to form our lifes?

“I have been through some troubles, in the last few years.”

Of course, I thought: his divorce.

“You are not over it yet?”

He smiled.

“What if I wouldn’t have gone to that bar that night?”

He had told me that story before: Instead of cooking at home he had decided to eat a focaccia at “La luna llena” at the corner of his street. A woman came over to his table, asking whether she could sit down.

“I have to speak with you” she said, “I see you from my window, when you work at night.”

She turned out to be the woman who lived in the apartment across the street of his own, on the third floor like his’.

“And what, if I wouldn’t have accompanied her after, the few steps to her house?”

He had seen her before, yes, but had paid little attention to her. Now she was there, and she seemed to be interested in that artist who drew his pictures at night, across the street.

“Of course I was flattered”, he agreed. “And she was not unattractive.”

“Maybe attracted to you?”

"That’s what she told me, when I went up with her, for another drink."

“And that was it?”

Another cheap story, I thought.

“No. Nothing happened, really. But then I wrote this letter, and I put it in her mail box, the next morning.”

Of course: writing, his other passion, besides the drawing.

“And then another letter, when I heard nothing from her.”

It was him, now, who started to look over the street to see whether she was at home. She rarely was, till late at night.

“It was the passion of a game: Could I get another response from her?”

He wrote letters across the street, daily, and put them in her mail box.

“One day I had a little note in my own mail box, not even in an envelope, just scribbled on a piece of paper.”

She had invited him over for dinner the next day.

“Yes, that was it.”, he said.

The usual story?

I wasn’t sure anymore, considering his picture. Not sure about anything.

* The picture with the “waving hands” is right here in my former post.

An Endless Goodbye.

It began, he told me, with his first wife, the one he had two children with. They used to wave goodbye to each other whenever there was an occasion to do so. Somehow the habit got dear to him of standing there, waving, till they got out of sight of each other. But never, in twenty-five years, they had left each other for more than a few days. One day was enough to wave as if it would be for a much longer time. He began to wonder about this habit only when she was about to leave him forever. That was, when he thought that maybe it was his own habit mainly, and not so much hers. And that's when he created this picture, with the waving hands, on a train station called "Les adieux". He showed it to me.

He got married again. A complicated story, with a lot of passion involved and, in the end, with his giving in to the fact that this new woman would have had to leave the country, if they wouldn't get married. He wanted her to stay. And no more waving goodbye forever.

"It was difficult", he said, "for both of us, because each one was attached to a different culture." And then, he explained, a prior relationship brought her first to France, and then to the French-speaking part of Switzerland.

"I met her right then, when that relationship was at its end."

He was Swiss, but from the German part, and he wanted her to stay.

"So you continued your habit of waving good bye, when you where married with her?", I guessed.

"Yes", he said, "and there were a lot of good-byes. We only saw each other on the weekends. I worked in the German part of the country and had my little apartment there. Our common home was in the French part, her new cultural homeland. She didn't want to change cultures once more."
It turned out that this second marriage had not lasted till the day it was promised to, not "till death do us part".

"I fell in love with somebody else, in my lonely days between the weekends, or that's what I thought, and I confessed this to my wife. And that was it: She wanted to divorce."

"Another long goodbye", he added, sadly.

And not the last one, it showed to be, when he continued.

"I still see her, from time to time, mostly for practical reasons."

It got obvious, from what else he told me, that "practical" meant "financial" as well, but not only. "Part of this is that we still have ugly fights, from time to time. It still hurts. That's why."

He looked sad when he added:

"And there is always a train to take, for one of us, when we part, and sometimes after these fights."
"And then I stand there, by the track with the leaving train, and I wave good-bye, and she waves back, with a smile. An endless goodbye."

The Orphan.

Would you want to be the little girl on the right in this picture? She happens to be my mother, an orphan at that time, somewheres between 1917 and 1920. The dark figures with her are the people she was living with after the death of her mother and her father, from a flu in the same year (1914), when she was only four years old. These people were her new family, before they found a place for her, with relatives*. They had dressed her nicely, for the occasion of posing for the photographer. And they must have been nice to her, I guess from what my mother had told me. But: What should I think about how she felt as the little girl in that somber company? - I had never asked my mother. But I wonder today, when I can't ask her anymore.

*Leo Allemann, from my recent post "Leo's Europe", and his wife Anna.