Michele and Mariella’s Memories
“Andrea Pazienza was a Prodigal Son, dearly loved by his father, a very fine artist. Anyone who has not seen Enrico Pazienza’s watercolors is missing one of Andrea Pazienza’s secrets. They are paintings for which it is right to use the word «ineffable». The color has the strength to move and the gentleness to persuade.”
“There were five of us in the family, on the sixth and top floor of the apartment building at via Daunia 43, in the center of San Severo. When the time came, Mom would say: “It’s ready, go and call Dad”. Out on the landing, climbing the three flights of stairs that led to the studio, we could already hear him cursing. Then, once inside the studio, Dad’s peremptory reply was: “Tell your mother I can’t right now”.
The studio had been built on the terrace floor; it was square, spacious and bright. The whole east wall was glass, and to the south there was another window. There was a square table in the middle, a chair and an easel, a bedside table, shelves, and all around a multitude of trays, saucers, brushes, jugs, paints, pencils, scissors, leads, sponges, penknives, rags, pieces of glass, tapes and much more.
While Dad let us know his annoyance at being interrupted, we’d find him in unusual poses, as if frozen holding a tilted sheet waiting for it to dry, or busy in a quick dance of brushstrokes, brush changes, washing and draining, to perform the painterly acts within the non-negotiable time that the watercolor technique imposes.
Watercolor is not opaque, it’s transparent. Mistakes can’t be corrected. Adjacent brushstrokes of two different colors, or of the same one, always produce a third where they overlap. The cohesion between water molecules increases the concentration of pigment at the edges of a wet area on a dry surface, unlike the way the color spreads into other still-wet patches it comes into contact with. A tint created on the spot, mixing the different base colors in a saucer, can never be reproduced exactly the same once it’s used up. The nature, porosity and moisture of the paper decisively influence the result.
Last but not least: there is no white. If there’s white in a box of watercolors, it’s surely tempera, and holding the sheet up to the light will be enough to reveal its opaque brushstrokes. This is what our father told us and taught his pupils at school. In Dad’s paintings the white is always that of the paper, and he was very keen to point that out.
So when, after a while, he came down from the studio, he had countless reasons to which to attribute his constant dissatisfaction and, as with his hunting stories, the whole family had to share the details. At the start of a painting the doubt was whether the initial patch should become sea or wood, and the next problem was that the patch that had become sea would have been better as wood, or vice versa. Sometimes he came down in despair because the evening before he had lingered painting in poor light and now everything looked different to him, or because he couldn’t stretch the water-soaked sheet. The last brushstroke of the day had always irreparably ruined everything.
And so on until the end of the painting, which never came. Seasons could pass between delivering one painting and starting another, but once he had begun, the immersion was total. The first phase of tidying tools and ideas was followed by the creative and executive phase, then a contemplative one for the last important touches of compositional balance. After that came the exact framing of the sheet for cutting the mat and positioning the signature and, finally, choosing the frame and assembling it himself under double glass. This last phase was the longest, because he suffered to part with the painting, and it lasted as long as the buyer friend’s patience with his friend Pazienza.”
