ON THE PATH
A Portrait Of My Mother, Made With Love And With Alzheimer’s: Interview With Nicolás Shi BY GREGO PINEDA, Translated by Nicolas Shi and Frank Blackburn
“When my mother died,” Shi began tremulously, “and naturally,” he justified himself, “I had a very strong emotional reaction, I felt the need to channel the range of emotions that were suffocating me. I imagined the portrait of my mother like any other painting that I have done; however, this time it was different… very different. I conceived the portrait to be painted in a range of colors that were diluted in 12 shades and made of thousands of small hand painted, magnetized metal pieces that could be put together like a puzzle to form a portrait of her.” “This technique was tedious and complicated because it forced me to paint and number each of the 2,878 small tiles, but it was the only way to understand the last years of my mother’s life and her final physical departure. As I already told you, her life was blurring in her memory. Little by little my mother was losing the memories of her life
The candor and goodness of the well known Salvadoran-Ameri- can-Chinese painter Nicolás Shi once again surprised me. This time he presented me with an unexpected ambush — warlike terminology that prevails in my Salvadoran generation — and it was without inten- tion on his part. Originally I had visited his studio located in the heart of Washington D.C., to learn about his latest painting achievements, aesthetic concerns, and to verify his highly respectable and enviable ethical stances. The meeting was warm, despite having been absent for 7 years, with a pandemic in between. After answering my questions and telling me about his thoughts and personal experiences during the pandemic, and how he came out of such a scourge with his partner Frank Black-
burn, we reached a point in the conver- sation that allowed for topics unrelated to my work as a cultural journalist and beyond his commitment to answer me. Suddenly, on a wall next to the room where we were talking in his study, I noticed a large-size painting where I recognized his mother’s features. This prompted me to ask him, as one who wants to turn to more intimate and less formal topics — a show of person- al friendship — “She’s your mother, right?” “Yes,” he replied. Motivated to gain his trust even more, I inquired, “Is she alive?” No, he said calmly. Then, with the reassur- ance of friendship I said, “Oh, I’m sorry, she suffered from Alzheimer’s, right?” “Yes,” Nicolás Shi answered, with a hint of deep loneliness. The change of tone in his voice was gut-wrenching, making me feel guilty for having brought up the subject. I tried to get out of the senti - mental mess I created, but my attempt made it even worse because I did not imagine how his answer would affect me when I asked him, “Tell me about the painting, tell me how and why you did it.” “Look,” he told me, “I lived through
until they vanished completely. I lived through that. That impotence and the slipping away of my mother’s memory made me conceive her portrait as some- thing that, once done, could be undone, little by little, frame by frame, so that nothing remained, as nothing was left in my mother’s mind.” “That is why this portrait has several characteristics: assembled, as you see it, it has color and life, but if you turn off the light and look at it in the shadows, the perspective changes and the appre- ciation is of a fading black-and-white photograph. Then if you remove — one by one — the hand-painted squares that compose it, you can live what she expe- rienced: your life fading away without you noticing. In this painting, centime - ter by centimeter, my mother’s years of life experiences are removed. And if you remove them all, there is nothing left. All this has made me meditate a lot and perceive life in a different way.” I know that the reader will be able to appreciate the intensity of what Nicolás shared and will be able to understand that I could no longer think or write the interview that I came to do. That would be for another time. It was enough to
part of my mother’s illness and the last times I visited her in El Sal - vador she no longer recognized me, and when she talked, she was a woman without time. She spoke to me of her childhood as if at that moment she was living it — a girl spoke with all her memory, but she was not my mother anymore. They were painful moments because you had a girl who needed protection as I once needed, but this time it was my mother. It was distressing, sad, painful, and profoundly everlast - ing.” I noticed that the conversation and the encounter had reached a point of no return, and I blamed myself for that. Then, flustered, I said: “Nicolás, focus on the painting, tell me what the process was and how you feel today when you see the result.” His answer has unsettled me to this day, as a son, as an artist, as a human being, as a father, and as a friend of Nicolás Shi.
capture the myth of Sisyphus* in his eagerness to paint and unpaint the portrait of his mother Sofía Quan de Shi through small, magne- tized paintings. Life is not one big painting, it is the sum of many small pictures, like the little things in life. Today, through Shi’s talent and creativity, we are invited to reflect on it. * It refers to a figure in Greek mythology who was condemned to re - peat over and over the same meaningless task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, only to see it fall back down again. As Albert Camus concludes, “The struggle itself... is enough to fill a man’s heart.” Grego Pineda is a Salvadoran-American writer with a Master’s degree in Hispano-American Literature.
18—PATHWAYS—Summer 22
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