November      

My father loved painting. He painted a lot, but he earned his living working in an office, he was a public servant. However, during the post-war years he put food on our table with his paintings. He copied romantic landscapes and got for the pictures a sack of potatoes, or cabbages, turnips, though never any sausages or speck.

As a child I loved sitting next to Papa watching how the paint on the brush slowly covered the canvas and the picture emerged.

When I left home my mother let me have a very small oil painting my father did of his grandfather.  

I also have a little print of a picture my father scratched onto a negative film strip. It is a self portrait when he was young with the Grim Reaper in the background. 

And what I value a lot is an image I surprisingly discovered in an art book I have of my fathers collection. He must have kept there a little drawing of himself between the front-pages for a long time.  The picture was not there when I got the book. And I only discovered this faint image many years later when I wanted to read the book from cover to cover. I think it is the sketch for the ‘Grim Reaper’ picture I have.  

I think only two of my father’s pictures are left. After my mother’s death no one took care of these things. Most of us children have moved away and the ‘old useless’ stuff was carelessly stored away, forgotten, lost.   

I wish some of his paintings we had on our walls when I was a child would have been kept, especially the portrait of his mother. That painting was once in en exhibition. Now this picture exists only in my memory.