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Look at my work, oh Omnipotent and despair!
Silent Dialogue
(Instead of a preface)
I was born in Budapest, August 7, 1958.
There is a smooth-eyed little boy in the picture. His feather does not keep the parting. White gloves on his politely folded hands.
After finishing primary school I graduated high school in humanities.
August 1977 – I joined the forces. After these 11 months I was admitted to the Catering and Hotel Trade College in Budapest that I successfully finished in four years.
After graduating in 1982, I worked in several renowned hotels and restaurants.
Restaurant “S”. Tempest preceding swelter. Everybody is sweaty and snappish. The restaurant leader on duty is wearing an impeccable white shirt and fully buttoned jacket. I receive a private smile and a cold drink.
These are those years when I discover the arts. I try my hand in water-colours and I make graphics and compose figurative, as well as realist paintings. I also write short stories and poems in parallel.
I do not remember what we were celebrating. Do you remember it, Peter? We had goose liver, medium and not rough, and a lot of cakes made with maroon, my favourite. The first painting was there on your study wall… you showed it somehow unwillingly. It was a sad painting, not even the orange sun could make it any merrier… you gave it to a friend of yours – a girl friend you were in love with.
My first real attempt to break out.
May 1984.
I spent my holidays in Amsterdam and was touched by the peace of the infinite sea. In the little city of Alkmar, on the North Sea shore, I painted my first oil pictures, of 80x60 cm. I first showed it to my dear friend Dezső MAGYAR, who – without my knowledge – showed it to a painter in Amsterdam; he immediately offered his help for my attending an art course that was just beginning.
We were shooting a film in Amsterdam. The staff was staying at the Tulip Hotel. There was a breathtaking bunch of flowers waiting for me in my room: exotic, multi-coloured flower and long stemmed larkspur, tea-rose with heavy petals, silver-spotted, ennobled marguerites … and there was a self-satisfied laughter on the phone as a response to my surprised voice:
‘Hi, have you already eaten?’
After 18 months I went back home to Hungary. I was looking for my place under the sky, now patiently, now desperately.
Autumn 1986. My father called me into his room and said: “You always want to paint what is evident for everybody. Now go and try to do the opposite. Formulate and paint what cannot be seen by others, what only you can see.”
January 1987. I go to Munich. In four months I paint 9 oil paintings, 95x110 cm; they are exhibited in the Art Gallery in Munich and sold in one month.
May, 1987. Hungary again. I must work. I work at the Berlin Restaurant during the day and I keep thinking, drawing and writing out of myself my feelings and confusions. I do not feel at ease.
February 1989.
My father falls seriously ill and passes away. I don’t even have the opportunity to bid him farewell.
My mother passes me a message from him: ”Don’t ever forget, my son: you can only beautifully create what really aches…”
Oh, Dad, I do miss you; it really aches… how much you used to love your prodigal son.
June 5, 1991, twenty to ten p.m. Mom is already together with Dad.
June 21, 1991. The burial day.
In my imagination it is not Her burial, it is a little boy that went away, to open space for the matured man who has already been shown his own value… Two bodies behind, but life in front of him.
I travel a lot. Make acquaintances. Lie. Love.
July 1991, Paris. I turn back to the colours of my past; something is getting born.
I am in Hungary again after a few months. I lock myself up in the flat, don’t go to the graveyard any more, I only keep painting and painting and … not painting.
January 1992, Toronto.
Bigger and bigger pictures are getting ready one after the other. In the meantime I also create smaller graphics and oleographs and keep listening to stories about the Jewish nation and Israel.
Eight months later, leaving the handling of my fifty big pictures and the organizing of my exhibition on someone else, I purchase a flight ticket – not out of my paintings price, but putting my family jewels in pawn – and in
October 1992 I step on Israeli soil.
Ben Gurion airport.
Everything that used to be story and politics and history and newspaper headlines in my life has suddenly become reality. I’m not surprised. I do what the others do.
Strong flames burst out of an abandoned luggage; everyone goes further…
Me too…
Seaside. Hotel Shalom.
November 1992
I apply for alia. In two weeks I have the immigration permit.
Under the influence of the first impressions I ran to paint, to paint everything, to draw and live.
I drink my cups of coffee in the morning, I smoke some cigarettes, have a bath, have my prayers and start work.
Days and weeks pass and I do not even notice. My friend Kazimir KÁPOLNAI is of great help, watching my joys and my sorrows with great love, without judging. He washes my paint-brushes and I keep painting, he fetches my drink and I keep painting, he takes care of me and I paint, I keep painting and start to feel that I have a mission.
I change from someone painting occasionally to someone continuously creating, I have become alive.
There are words I forget to utter or to put down. I only do one thing: I paint and paint and kind of believe that it was worth to be born.
Then the problems begin.
The owner of the flat wants the pictures instead of the rent.
The shopkeeper selling the canvas and the paint wants the paintings instead of money.
The travel agent I am negotiating a ticket to Venice for an exhibition wants to choose from my paintings.
Helpful persons solve these problems.
The man who makes the frames touches my paintings in a way that even I am surprised.
With love and care and devotion he helps me choose the frames that fit the paintings and he orders them – on his own expense – from the most expensive Italian and Belgian and German firms.
The pictures are gathering fast. My fourth flour flat is papered with them.
In March 1993 I begin to walk along the famous Gordon Street in Tel Aviv, to see the galleries, to organize an exhibition for my pictures.
Everywhere I am received with suspicion; they ask big sums of money, make unreal conditions.
But I want a place on this earth for my pictures.
I run along Gordon Street again and again.
And then I get to a decision: I am going to have my own gallery.
I have won 2,400 dollars for an exhibition in the open; I put them on the roulette table of arts.
I rent the only rentable parlour in Gordon Street; during the following ten days I move walls, I build phoney walls, I have water introduced, buy wall to wall carpets, have electricity reinstalled, paint the walls, paper, clean and happily carry the new furniture.
After having worked against the collar, I am standing in the middle of my own Gallery as the happiest man in the world and contemplating my pictures on the walls.
I couldn’t have done all these without my friends.
Naturally, the money I have started with is not enough. I make everything on tick, working with pre-dated checks and having problems because of them later.
But who could speak about the past, about problems and pains when in only eight months after immigrating to Israel I am able to open my own Gallery in the very heart of Tel Aviv and I am also able to place my own catalogue into the hands my friends.
This is the first time I have been in Israel since childhood.
Peter has called telling me he is waiting anxiously for me.
I feel distressed…
The airport is beautiful. It’s warm and there are palm trees around. So I’m here…
He is waving to me from the crowd. He still has his open teenager smile.
How short his hair is.
We give each other a hug. I can feel the waves of love coming towards me…
Shalom, Peter!
August 7, 1993. I’m thirty-five.
Basic Aim of My Pictures and Writings
At the base of my pictures and writings stands my wish to fan up the latent fire of faith, to stir it up in the tired, tortured hearts and souls. I trust and state that we must not give up hope and that we – humans – can still blaze sometimes as fire does. We will be yellow and red and black and of any other nuance; we will still take one another’s hands and flap and flutter and race and run and heat like fire against the evil.
I’d like to illuminate, to be nice and comforting, so that all the positive verbs be true for me. I want to be combative and eager. I want to burst out of my room into Yours. I want to keep shooting out my long tongue and I want to open my effervescent soul. I want to run, to break windows, to penetrate walls and barriers because I want air, fresh and enriched with the scent of moss.
I want to paint colours that are close to everybody’s heart. I want to get released from my cage and to release everybody who is worth to, so that we have bourdon and red and ruddy and purple and vermilion and yellow and scarlet; and let me have – let us have – souls, coloured ones like fire.
But only that fire which is an ancient help for humankind and not an ancient enemy.
I do have a lot of friends, I know that; even unknown ones. And I know that when someone perceives me, I am worth of the love of the best with my thoughts and colours and the moods of my pictures, as well as with my passionate sense of beauty – and they won’t ever leave me.
I haven’t stored up earthly goods. My only treasure is that instrument placed by the Lord in my heart and brains and hand; my only wish is to be a channel for the sound of this instrument towards the souls of my fellow humans.
Even if it is difficult to believe, I am a human myself and committed, too.
As such, I turn to humankind. I’m not afraid of the stupid and malevolent and malignant.
I have nothing to tell them.
There are the honest and hurt and really tactful and chaste that I feel anxious for…
RUBINT AVRAHAM PETER
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