A day in the life of The painter

Ghazi paints with his soul

Today I get up early since we mustn’t be late when Ghazi’s driver comes to pick us up. He’s a medium sized man, with a scar on his cheek and looks more like a Turk than a Chinese. We arrive in a street where buildings line a park where old men play Go, the national Chinese board game. I go into a building that has just been cleaned, judging by the large puddle of water. I go up the stairs and each door looks like looks like the one at Marina’s, my “almost” aunt, who has a two-meter steel door with a thickness of 50 cm. Dad explains to me that there’s security problem in this city. We go up a few floors and ring the doorbell in front of a door similar to the others. A young man, about 19 years old, opens the door; he’s dressed in military clothes. It’s Ghazi’s grandson. We go in and his son greets us; he’s in his fifties and a computer engineer. He accompanies us to the living room where Ghazi is waiting for us. He seems more comfortable here than at last night’s supper, since he’s home. He’s wearing a stained white shirt and comes to greet us. He shows us his paintings. He explains them one after the other. I learned that an Ouigour wrote, 100 years ago, an Ouigour language dictionary, but the Chinese government forbade its translation since it didn’t want the Ouigours to have anything to learn their language. They had to wait for the English translation of the book for the Anglophones to put pressure on the Chinese government so that it could finally be published in the Ouigour language. That was done in 2007. He tells us the story of the Ouigour Romeo and Juliet he painted. We leave the living room and go towards a table where hundreds of tubes of paint are laid. He sits and continues the painting he had started earlier. He mixes the colors and when the mix is right, he puts the paint on the canvas. He does a small canvas that will be used as a model for a much larger painting. In front of a painting of a peasant, he explains that for him peasants are the people with the most freedom. They might be poor and do the same job their entire life, but they don’t have problems with overtime, 35-hour work weeks and salary increases that Western societies know today. He works and when he’s finished, he rests, thinks and dreams, something a bureaucrat never does when he thinks only of doing his 35 weeks and then going home. After explaining this to us, he invites us to have some fruit that his grandson brought out. While we’re eating, a boy of about 10 who is already in university arrives. He’s gifted, and also Ghazi’s grandson. When we are finished, Ghazi’s son shows us the DVD he did on his father’s work. I tell dad that it looks a lot like Aydin’s work with dad, and he tells me: “but you know, I consider Aydin my son.” When we finish the DVD, Ghazi asks dad to take a picture of him and I film, then take pictures. I even nearly knock over one of Ghazi’s paintings. When we finish the portraits, Ghazi takes a sheet of paper and empties half his tube of Chinese ink in a plate to do calligraphy. He takes a brush and I notice that normally his hand shakes, but when he takes a brush everything stops, as though there are messages being transmitted between his hand and the brush. In his hand, the brush moves as though performing a dance, like a woman dancing to seduce men. Dad is moved by this movement at once delicate and majestic. He has tears in his eyes. His calligraphy finished, he needs to put his signature to affirm that he’s the artist. He looks in a closet for a little stone, then a larger one and a round box that contains red ink that allows him to sign his calligraphies. He takes a magazine and a paper towel that he puts underneath his calligraphy at a precise place. He takes the small stone, looks at it and turns it delicately to see which is the right side to sign in the right place. He dips the stone in the red ink and with his hand of nearly 75 years, presses down on the paper. He takes the other stone, dips it in the ink and after changing the magazine and paper towel’s position, he puts his second signature. For a few seconds after, he observes in silence his work to admire it and also to see if it’s complete. His work finished, he looks at us and says that it’s for me but that there’s one thing left to do to finish the calligraphy, and that is to frame it in nice paper and he will send it to me. I thank him and get ready to leave with dad when he invites us out for lunch. We say goodbye to the family and go down the stairs. Downstairs, I notice I forgot something so I go back up. And I think of what I hear a lot: “when you don’t have a head, you have legs!” I finally go meet the others to go for lunch. Everyone knows Ghazi and greet him. It’s a joyful lunch. After, when we are finished we get up and I talk with Ghazi’s grandson. We talk about the Ouigour identity and his country of which he’s proud. And when I ask him which country he’s talking about, he answers that he considers Oriental Turkistan his country, not China. I tell him that he must believe in his country and we leave.