Picasso's musing that every child is an artist is both true and exaggerated. Young children create art instinctively and with great enthusiasm – it is their way of exploring the world and the capabilities of their senses and fingers, to understand and express their emotions.
A film was playing on the tiny screen above the driver – it was about a beautiful woman looking for the right husband and ultimately finding him. Or maybe it was about a handsome man looking for the right wife, but not before the final credits. To make it even more fun, the film was split into novellas which opened with colourful lettering and wedding music. All the actresses looked like Jennifer Lopez, or maybe she was in it herself, who knows? The question required the kind of focus that Galya was unable to spare.
Since ancient times, the arts have been passed down from teacher to student – an established line of professionals who learned composition, themes and techniques from their elders, developed their own styles, made their own discoveries and then passed on their experience to the young. This practice nurtured traditions, spawned schools, inspired change and spawned new art forms.
An exciting exhibition, Thinking in Materials, at the Sofia Press Gallery, explores the idea of continuity through the influence of a master painter over a group of students he trained in the early 2000s.
a
summer with its easy wins
summer with its plans
made at the drop of a hat
everyone’s willing
to give in to warmth
the holiday is today
let’s seize it
go through summer’s open doors
and its garden shadows
the first freezing gust of wind
is easily dismissed
summer an abyss of hope
in which year after year
you collapse ever downward
summer the warmest of life’s seasons
z
summer
summer
Beginning
it’s light out I tell you
there’s still lots more
my beautiful bird
is far away I can see it
flying away again
I love without being loved
Human
to A
I’m at 2130 metres above sea level
This story took place on the New Year’s Eve of my last winter in Bulgaria. Together with my wife and daughter, I greeted 1997 in a rented one-bedroom apartment in a windy, ugly suburb of Varna. I don’t remember this day to have heralded аnything new and different for us.
There’s someone you have not yet met:
He wears three mittens in crimson red.
His furry coat – so soft it feels;
his socks have holes on all five heels.
He’s always hiding in the pantry;
details of his life are scanty.
In the dark he quietly moves,
munching on some sugar cubes
and frolicking in secrecy
when no one else is there to see.
A tiny cockroach he has tamed;
this land of jars he has reclaimed,
and he is the lonely lord
to all that people here have stored --
I. The Eternal City
Chapter Three: The Frogs
