Artist Fernando Botero in his studio: Pietrasanta, Italy
Truthful Fictions
There are three lines drawn in the sand. The wind blows, the lines scatter in the wind. Nature observes the fragile agreement. What will time remember? Maybe the transience of time and space.
“Will the wind remember
The names it has blown in the past?” — Jimi Hendrix
I merely urged my camera to explore the celluloid possibilities. I needed the adventure. I needed to cross boundaries in time and space. I needed to know what might be seen if I ventured across the dare. There is a purpose I imagine every day. If I cross over the line, a new discovery will be ahead.
I saw the great cannon in Jacques Offenbach’s operetta, “A Trip to the Moon”. An adaptation of Jules Verne’s “From Earth to the Moon”. In one morning witnessed nature’s ethereally hallucinogenic stark skyline, a whiteness of naked swans caressing Earth’s contours. I stood with photographer Edward Curtis and Director John Ford. The movie, The Searchers, played in my mind. John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards crossed the open plains of Monument Valley.
I spun the ideas, as if they were in my mind multicolored crinkled cellophane. I rotated my eyes, raised multiple cameras, and fired a single shutter speed as if into a Rubik’s Cube of all three imagined stories. I know the visual highlights were inviting me to seek what the other side had to offer. The necessary beauty of living.
Fernando Botero, the Colombian artist, posed for me. The first time, he was like my Melville’s whale. There was always a whale of particular proportions in my scopes. I have met Botero in five or seven cities. In each city he greeted me as if I was the most important person in the room. When he extended his hand in friendship, I easily in mind recalled his friendship with Willem de Kooning: Botero described that moment as two artists from separate worlds with one idea in common. Art.
The success he built was celebrated by many. The man, the artist in my presence never walked with airs. It was his pleasure to take me by the hand. In my imagined pirouette, ask me how I like what I see, how do I see his art.
It is impossible to define why my experience in one city was more entertaining than another. If I had to make a difficult choice I would say the Italian city Pietrasanta would be the winner.
Before I photographed his portrait, he invited me for a drive. He picked me up at my hotel and with not a word from me, he whole heartedly shared how happy he was to be in the car not touring but two people along for a ride from the small charm of one city to what I would consider the grand stories from Carrara Italy: The days from Michelangelo and the reminiscing of “The David” and more.
Botero in the Carrara Foundry shared at one time with Michelangelo
To like art, to love centuries of art in a moment. To feel you were sitting with DNA from Michelangelo to the contemporary Botero. Five or six of us had an impromptu picnic. To sit at a table with the stone carvers. To engage in broken English with the people who made marble dreams realized was my ”wow” factor.
A millennium of sculpture was born where I sat. Davids to my left, Boteros afar in the foundry. A wall (like an auto mechanics shop) of magazine porn in every other direction. A slightly embarrassed photographer enjoyed the visuals.
After a few congenial snaps of the artist in his sculpture environment, Botero said, “andiamo”.
We returned to his home atop a mountain bluff shaped like a cocked hat. It seemed that Botero led the troops in this small craftsman’s town of Pietrasanta. He was here, equally Caesar and Spartacus.
The portraits at his villa were like framing stills for the cinema. The artist and his work, the physical gestures with brush and paint. I felt I was a marauder wielding my camera equipment. I felt I was a guest. I felt I participated in the creative process. I was in a portal of discovery—a time machine. For centuries Italy has embraced the burden of beasts who wanted to live as artists. These beasts live in her past and present. Fernando Botero is such a beast.
I could in memory clearly see the lines in the sands. There was a prevailing wind like a lilting Italian aria. Drifting through my snapshot of time spent with the artist. There was not a dance to be had, just a dream inhaled like Ahab spotting his white whale.
I have only been where my camera saw. I have never dreamed of another world. A symphony of ideas carries me into a calm within the urbanized frenzy. Not even silence is heard.
I knew and remember every single subject in view that my camera missed. It wasn’t the one that lured the eyes into the brightest solarium, the darkest den, the most colorful aquarium. It is not that another frame; I wouldn’t be successful. It is simply a story that is mine, captured as I crossed the lines in the metaphoric sand.
Botero in his Paris Studio> It once belonged to the photographer Brassai