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WATERCOLORS “LANDSCAPES AND TRAVELS”

I do not seek praise. I seek understanding.
When someone says they like my work, I remain indifferent.
But when someone demonstrates that they truly understand it, then I am happy; I feel a sense of satisfaction, and a genuine curiosity about how it is being understood.
If I give a lecture in a language the audience does not know, the applause is meaningless. I have failed to communicate. There has been no understanding.
To communicate, one must know each other’s languages—one’s respective modes of expression.
In my travels, I have very often found myself living day-to-day among people whose language I did not know, and who, in turn, did not know mine.
Whether I found myself on a beach shaded by coconut palms, lost in an arid valley between mountains, or surrounded by the sand dunes of some desert, I would sit on the ground, take a travel notebook and a pencil from my bag, and begin to draw. I started with the basics: a fish, an octopus, a jellyfish, a boat. Fishermen—surrounded by their wives and children—would begin to laugh, telling me the names, which I would then write down beneath each image. I would repeat the words aloud. I was learning. And I kept on drawing: a fish, a goat, a Bedouin tent, the sun, the moon and the stars, clouds, flashes of lightning, rain. Beneath every drawing, I would write the corresponding word, trying to commit it to memory. Then, I would draw animals—a buffalo, an eagle, a parrot, a scorpion. I would act out various actions to learn more names, sketching the gestures of milking a goat—the milk, the glass, the act of drinking. They would laugh, clearly amused, while I continued to draw: woven palm leaves, huts made of stone and brushwood blanketed in snow, camels resting on the ground.
I communicated through images; they would recognize them and respond by naming what they saw, finding joy in the inner experience of grasping an image—an experience as ancient and primal as visual art itself, a form of communication through visual shapes.
They understood me, I understood them; we understood one another.
Whenever it was time for me to leave, they would grow sad—but I would tear the pages from my sketchbook, where I had drawn their world, and, with a bow, present them as a gift. Their smiles would return, and they would laugh, content.
I would vanish from their lives, but the drawings would remain.
At least, until a typhoon, an avalanche, or a storm at sea came to snatch them away.

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