SOUL

Once I went to visit my parents and we were looking at old family photos. It appeared that my father, in the course of getting rid of junk from a wardrobe had inadvertently thrown out a box containing my old copy books from nursery and primary school. My mother fell in to a black mood for the rest of the evening. My father, who had done this unawares, immediately realized there was nothing he could do. I must have been around thirty at the time, but I could still recall the pleasure I felt, sitting at my wooden desk in school and filling up those pages of grid lines with images and color. These copy books with their dog eared corners contained, apart from the exercises in copying letters in capitals and lower case, a vast number of sticks, flowers, fishes and small houses all drawn in pencil and colored with pastels from my pencil case. The thin grid on the pages helped us children to trace lines, letters and simple decorations according to the instructions that the Teacher wrote with chalk on the grid side of the black board. Today I’m recalling the memories of those copy books and choosing one of the little houses to transform it in to pixels and append it in to the corner of this website.

Decades have passed since that time I sat in the enchanting nursery school in Garbatella. Naturally my father was immediately forgiven for his rash gesture and me, I’ve continued down the years to sharpen my pencils while listening to the music of Pergolesi and the songs of Carosone.

Theatres, fencing academies and planetariums have passed through my head and I drew them for any possible clients and patrons. Strolling through the various sections of this site you’ll come across some of this architecture which is docked in Uzbekistan, China, Eritrea, and Afghanistan while other pieces are on their way to completion in Mexico, Australia and Hungary. Even though the materials from which they are made -paper, plaster, ink, chalk- are not exactly stable, they guarantee the time necessary for any curious mouse to visit the length and breadth of this rather teeming, bizarre world.

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