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Buffalo Days in Eastern Europe
Hungary 1999
Buffalo days in Eastern Europe where people are hungry for culture as heards of buffalo stop traffic walking over the roads of Romania.
Seven weeks and seven countries. We drove to Hungary passing through Germany and Austria. The yellow van stuffed with painting supplies, photo equipment,bedding, tents, all but the kitchen sink (we had a bucket ). The first three days in Germany with our friend Michael, an ex- patriot from Woodstock, brought back nostalgic days.
At the first pension in Hungary, my dog was attacked by two Rotweilers. He was fighting for his life in a hospital in Budapest . My fellow artists and I put on three performances of a life time. Kapolcs, Szentendre and Budapest. The intensity of the music and dance will echo in my soul for decades to come.
Judit, with her wide eyes, spoke through her shining sax notes, sounds and bellows of a gentle soul . Zolt, with his sax ,brang surprise and playfullness through the contradictions and melodies, sounds one usually never hears. Adam, violin man, plucked his instrument in repetition, creating and lifting the sweet violin sounds of wood into the air with his bow. I was taken to an etherial place something like the twilight zone - lifted .
It was Eszter, the dancer and choreographer, who pulled me down to earth and reality, as she cut through the space with her body, dividing and concouring the entire stage, inch by inch.
Who am I to be the one to seep through the cracks, to find myself painting in such absolute creativity, such extreme thickness of weight. The taste of the open air and the blueness of the sky enveloped my spirit. I started to paint with an ultramarine blue pigment, the grass was pulled by the roots to plant the fibers directly into the blue paint. Sweat poured down my brow -YELLOW -as I felt the presence of the sun caressing my body and Eszter touched the right lower corner of the canvas with her left hand and I touched Eszter's hand and together we pushed the paint to the right. There were hundreds of spectators, sitting ever so quietly in the audience, maybe they were holding their breath. For all I could hear was the sweet wild music of our great musicans.
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