Vocation.
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Guest author: Pedro Oriol.
Painter
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The old prodigies, Miguel Angel, Leonardo, (perhaps those two were everything in their time, youth, maturity, old age), Goya and his last black painting, Velazquez and his jesters, Titian in his self-portrait, El Greco in his delirious painting, Rembrandt who, in his late paintings, turned his brushstrokes into an ungraspable matter of light, Mancini in old age who transcended his virtuosity into spirit…Yes, I mean the old prodigies….
Why did they give their most essential work on the threshold of death?
Vocation demands a kind of seclusion, a total concentration, a forgetting of so much life that runs through the veins; life, in its fullness, is an earning of one’s living, a giving of oneself to family, to loves, to friends, to physical vigor, and all of that is …lived…within…and without.
When life has already been lived and nature grants you more time, vocation bursts forth and expands, skill and virtuosity are no longer needed, it no longer matters to have the precise hand of the surgeon, the only thing that truly radiates is the soul, there are no more distractions, all the heavy matter has been left behind, there has been a detachment from the physical, a liberation, and painting is no longer even painting, it is something else…
Something like pure vocation, which borders on other worlds unknown, uncharted, unreachable for the rest of humankind.
Painting is a conquest, a long road, like that of Saint John of the Cross, reaching the light through the dark night…
– Vocation – – Home: Alejandra de Argos –
