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Landscapes from the gas station.

My father worked at a gas station.  He arrived at eight in the morning and left at six in the evening.

 

During his shift at the gas station, he pumped fuel for indifferent drivers, exchanged words with cab drivers, stained his hands in oil, braved the cold winter wind.

 

What else did my father do during the ten hour work day in the hostile environment?

 

I never knew, and it never occurred to me to ask him.

 

Like all young kids at the time, I was blinded by what I believed was my own destiny.

 

But now I think I understand what my father did during those hours:

 

He painted landscapes.

 

How can someone paint landscapes and pump fuel at the same time?  He didn’t do it simultaneously. . . He stored what he saw in his memory and painted it later. . . 

 

But what did my father see from his post, next to the gas pump, during the twenty years that he worked at Automóvil Club Argentino?

 

What landscapes would he perceive from that position?

 

Nowadays, I discover in his work, that the landscapes were infinite:

 

I remember my father told me one day that he was fascinated by street posters.  “They are extraordinarily expressive (he used to say.) Chance creates unique compositions and, most fascinating of all: they change with every moment, with the wind and the rain."

This is the answer then:

 

From his post at the gas station, my father would see some publicity posters on the sidewalk across the street: there were the landscapes.

 

He didn’t need to budge, or travel far, or install himself with his paint pad in front of the sea (as he had done before, as all landscape artists do according to the lessons of Impressionism).

 

Now the landscapes came to him, unfolded before him, and fortunately, changed every day.

 

Surely a spectator could find many more interpretations about this series of works: “the collages.”  Texts intermingle and mean nothing, the words, letters and advertisements turn to silence.  The absurd and nonsensical. . .

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There are many possible interpretations, equally valid and profound, nonetheless, I prefer to see, in these works-- the series of collages—a painter’s innocent and genuine vocation to register “what he sees,” “what he beholds before him.”

 

I remember that is exactly what my father used to say:

 

“Art is not related to fantasy or madness, as is usually believed.”

 

On the contrary, art is the most realist vocation.  It is the capacity to see the visible.  To have one’s eyes open to the obvious and the evident! . . .that is what we artists need to do.

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But how difficult it is to do. . . 

 

Nowadays, I agree with my father.  How brave of him and how brave one needs to be to keep one’s eyes open without blinking, facing all the horror and beauty of the world!

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