Gynaika

Sylvia Bollé

- ‘Mum ! Look you’ve got blue feet’, it sounded from the bathroom in the morning..
- ‘What’s that mum?’
- ‘It’s paint, Max.’
- ‘What mum? You know that’s not allowed mum, don’t you.’

Of course he was right. But when he has grown I will tell him how much fun it is, late at night, when everything is quiet at home, to start painting on a large canvas with paint and candlewax, using old brushes and brand new ones. Swinging with kilometres of household tissuepaper, wornout linnen rags stiff with paint. In oversized overalls, on bare feet, all muscles bundled to get motion in the paint on the rythm of music. Bathing in sweat, having drunk just enough wine (because the fear to reform this white canvas is sometimes bigger than before), becoming one with every stroke of paint, making a little correction with the back of my hand or my elbow.

Big rugs protecting the floor that can not catch every spot of water. A few puffs from my cigarette, pacing through the room and then, look at the painting upside down. The painting goes on and on or stops abruptly and is put aside for a couple of weeks to let it grow and rise in my head. The search for the anatomy of the ‘woman’ long forgotten, the esthetic one should answer to doesn't apply to me any more.

No, my relation with little pots and tubes of paint has grown. More fingerwork, much more water, although the medium has become acryl and no longer water paint. The canvas is much bigger than before and that makes me happy. I would have liked to play a role in the commercial of Amaretto where a beautiful woman with big brushes and pots of paint attacks several square meters of wall. If we have to give it a name let’s call it the amaretto-style, it’s Si Bollé.

Viva la vida, et en couleurs la vita è bella! Yallah!