The Portrait: Me through her eyes (Me attraverso i suoi occhi)

I look at the canvas and wonder to myself “Do I really look that mean?!”. The sad part: I already know the answer…

Her hands are flying wildly across the paper. She’s broken three pencil points so far and snapped a crayon in half. Casualties of war, she discards them and continues, unwavered. She jumps up, frantically and shuffles to the living room to find a marker that is just the right color. I try (and fail) to quiet my neurotic side, which is currently glaring at the discarded pencil shavings on the floor secretly itching to sweep them up. She comes back into the room and gazes at my hair with pleased curiosity. She wants to get the bleached and hennaed color just right but can’t seem to find the tools for the job. She settles on a yellow crayon which she first drags violently over the paper, then scribbles over it with a brown marker.

Guya Versari, a teacher and trained painter, is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence under the guidance of the art critic Capocchini with a thesis on “Futurism: Boccioni and Marinetti”. But to me, she’s the mother of a good friend. A peculiar and artsy woman in appearance, I find out later from a mutual friend, that she is nearly blind but paints more of what she senses spiritually in a person than what she sees visually. I’m told I should be flattered that she wants to draw me. And I am.

I’m wearing no makeup, my hair is a mess and her hands are moving so feverishly that this spur of the moment portrait could turn out any which way. She reminds me to straighten my head, and I attempt to fix my posture. I‘ll admit that I’m a little nervous as I sneak peeks down at the unfinished work. I want to tell her that my eyes look crooked, or that my forehead couldn’t possibly be that big, or that my lack of eyebrows is my mom’s fault, and probably my dad’s too and that my brother’s eyebrows are perfect and he must’ve been switched at birth and…… but I refrain. Half because she doesn’t speak any English and half because I’m not quite sure who invited my vanity to the party. So I sit. And I wait.

Guya is known for more abstract depictions of reality. Her paintings reflect her own inner world, and whether that world is mysterious, joyous or painful, she’s always careful to be very truthful about her current sense of the world. My understanding of her is that she has a sixth sense so to speak. She understands a sublayer of life that can easily be ignored had she not this form of spiritual literacy. She reads into the invisible watermark that exists in the space between her eyes and your existence as though confirming it as reality. She portrays life through the colors and movement of her paintings so that they are to be experienced rather than simply looked upon. Even flowers, she says, are not only a symbol of life and happiness, but a tapestry of colors, of light, a vitality, a movement of lava.

I stare at the final product. This sketched portrait of me. There is something about it. This depiction of me. Sure it looks like me, but more, it feels like me. The eyes and the mouth. They tell my story. A story I never translated for this woman who sat in front of me and read me like a book, with words that neither of our languages would allow us to efficiently convey. I’m learning something herein Italy. Something that you have to learn when you don’t speak the same language. It’s that communication is so much more complex than I could’ve imagined. And that the most beautiful things don’t have to be said...

Love, Me.... Free