THINKING AND CREATING

THINKING AND CREATING

By Giancarlo Frisoni

I did not know all these things, they were the ones looking for me. I only knew that suddenly I was left without even a friend to play with because they had all gone to stay in the city, and I was thinking about what to do to pass the time. I spent long moments looking at the colors of the fields that had never seemed so beautiful to me before. Looking at the cracked walls of the old ghetto where time had scratched strange shapes, some beautiful almost fairytale, others complicated and abstruse. I remember the shape of a twisted trunk, the head of a snake that frightened me, the face of a horrible monster that I thought to myself - little by little I'll change you -. So with a pointed stone I had traced signs to make her hair, the oval of a pretty face, then the arms, strands of flowers in one hand. Moving away I had liked it and it no longer inspired me that sense of apprehension. Since that day I have had pockets full of nails, stones and coals, and I scratched, I smeared walls and doors.

My "what to do" had become how, where, and when to do, so much so that my mother had to come and look for me! Then it came natural to steal the copper to color the skies of my drawings, I always looked at it on the wall behind the vine of the porch how beautiful the blue was! But it was not enough for me, I wanted the colors of the whole earth, and I crawled elm and mauve leaves on the wall until they left the green, from the poppies I stole the red, from the pollen the yellow, and purple from the wine.

Never again do I remember a period so full of me. I looked at things and the landscape to understand and learn what I didn't know, names that I codified in my own way: my cuts were the lines, the shapes the drawing, the proportions the perspective. In the meantime, I was copying what I had on the walls, and I dreamed of becoming a painter like the child drawn on the color box that my older sister kept strictly in the school folder. Yes, the colors, a dilemma! For me who didn't have them, they were never enough, there were only those I saw and found in nature, and those I had to use! The passion and curiosity thus moved my world, they discovered me inventor, eyes and hands found and tried everything from sulfur to elderberry juice, from rusty water to walnut husk to egg yolks. And then the earth, my land that I collected when it was dust, I kneaded it with my hands and attached it to the wall. Only I had no glue and when it dried it cracked and then fell, then I helped myself with handfuls of flour that I used as a binder, I had seen grandfather dabbing the cauldron holes.

Today I can say that that period forged and taught me a vision and a philosophy of special life, which led me more and more towards the curiosity, beauty and pleasure of things. In the interest of knowing, thinking, creating and doing. The dream I had as a child I can say has come true, and today painting is part of me.