for Gela Pisarova
Her rural scenes in their luminous shades take up every space on her walls. The canvases are made of linen that grew in a field of flax, its warm earthy smell steeped in summer's white nights. The paintings depict women and girls hauling grasses, or washing linen in the lake, or hanging the sheets on a line to dry in the field. Faceless, these brightly dressed figures seem to drift, translucent through the frame. But something hides in them as the memory of light in a dying leaf. Maybe the ghostly city the artist escaped when she went to live with her grandmother during the Siege. Or the peat she dug till her fingers bled as she imagined her parents still alive by the freezing window, every part of her trembling and mute as she waited to hug them again. Something wants to brush us away—or hold us where the flax flowers still rise and breathe on deep moonless nights.
