29 May 2020. Met Robert.
A painting from Robert arrived this morning. Landscape above, with trees reflected in water--a slow river, late fall, or maybe the very end of winter, with snow in patches—the colors ochre and sienna, merging into darkness on either side--blasted almost, as of the image were appearing in a flash of light, the feelings contradictory. Below, a long row of windows and doorways, in Warsaw--or maybe one of the very old neighborhoods in Amsterdam--many of them boarded up. War traces visible on the walls, stone work and exposed brick. He's run them all together, side by side, so that their continuity also expresses time. And from one dark opening, painted en grisaille, a woman's face. Robert's note above tells me the street is Ul. Grzybowska 29--still standing then, in the Ghetto, from a photo he made in 1968--but that the figure is the sister of his father, Webster-von Parera. Between the two a band of black with a phrase painted in Yiddish script: gedenk in zey un frey zich mitn lebn. To think of you and free you with life...
Did I ever know her name before? The van Parera is Portuguese. Jewish, in all probability--like one of the family names inscribed on the wall of the wintershul in the 'Snoga, Amsterdam’s old Portuguese synagogue. Robert would sometimes tell me that his father had Portuguese roots, but the name itself now illuminates this connection.
My dear friend. We first knew each other in Warsaw, and all these traces fit together, for both of us-- lived and understood. Which of course he knows, too, even if it's now another 30 years we haven't seen each other.
I first drew his more dramatic self, with deep set eyes, looking out from the side. But the melodrama wasn't right, so I reworked it to show him in a more pensive mode, spectacles on his nose, thinning hair, thoughtful, a little askew. Or is it just the drawing? I like to think of him this way, regardless--like one of the beautiful characters in a Wim Wenders film, always close, almost reachable...
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Note: Quite fortuitous (more than that, really) that I'd done the Ulica Glogera drawing just yesterday--and then Robert's painting arrives this morning. Together with what he writes. Our circles have always been joined this way...
