Families logo

Budding Artist

My Painting Journey

By Attila Jacob FerencziPublished 3 years ago 12 min read
Like

There was a time, art was all there was...besides my faith, I was totally immersed in creating art of many kinds. Drawing, Charcoal, Pastels, Graphite. Painting, Acrylic, Oil, Watercolor. Silk Screen Printing. Photography. Photo Silk Screening.

In High School I spent lunch hours in the darkroom, developing original photography and photographic screens for printing. I ditched other classes to work on my Art. I was totally smitten. And obsessed.

I admired Andy Warhol and his photo silkscreens of famous people such as Marilyn Monroe and many others. The Surrealist Painters of the day and days gone by, such as Salvador Dali. The dreamscape paintings with the dripping clocks and the unusual figures.

I lived and breathed for creating art. I printed an image of a man in a straight jacket symbolizing my confusion over ordinary life. Dating and teen angst. I couldn't imagine my life without art and creating original works.

I created a nine-paper stencil silkscreen of a mountain range with a lake in the foreground. I did a workup of a six by four inch silkscreened image of my prom date, Tracey multiplied, six images high and five images wide each image in its own colorway. In shades of reds, yellows, blues, pinks, rusts, greens, purples, and lavenders, a la Andy Warhol.

I had applied for admission to the then Vancouver School of Art, now Emily Carr, and was accepted after graduation from High School.

Around that time my parents were making plans to move to Abbotsford and open an automatic transmission repair shop and were expecting me to join them. My dream of art school was quickly slipping away. If I continued down that path I would get no support and I did not know how to make it happen without my parents' help.

Finally, we came to a compromise. I would move to Abbotsford and help work in the family business but I would get an eight hundred square foot mezzanine floor at the back of the shop for a dark room, silk screening, drawing, and painting studio.

As the shop came into being it expanded beyond its original boundaries and my studio area became another parts storage room. When I complained that my hopes and dreams were being trampled on my father just said he needs the space and that I should grow up and learn a trade as he had at my age and quit chasing this artistic pipe dream I had in my head.

Well, I was gravely disappointed that I had been lied to and that my hopes and dreams weren't being considered, not one bit. I wanted to quit and move into Vancouver to follow my dreams but I was afraid of leaving the comforts and support of my family. It did not occur to me that I could secure a student loan and work part-time at something in Vancouver and I could still make my dreams a reality.

I was afraid of venturing out on my own as I was always brought up believing that if I stuck to my family, my family would take care of me. And so I embarked on a career in the business of my parents' choosing. I was a good worker and I was encouraged to deal with the customers and answer the phones at the front desk, as my English was better than my father's and he hated being interrupted by clients and phone calls while he was rebuilding transmissions in the back.

I was nineteen years old and had just purchased a house with my mother's help and the proceeds of my ICBC payout of a new Chevy Camaro which I had inadvertently totaled.

My drinking had increased and I was becoming a more or less daily drinker because although I was good at my job I was truly unhappy.

I frequented a small disco club called the Honey Bee in Abbotsford and that is where I met my first wife who had a young son she had out of wedlock. At this point, she did things to me, things sexually that really pleased me.

The morning after the first night we spent together, her four-year-old son came into her bedroom when I awoke, while his mother was still asleep beside me, and asked me if I would be his new daddy? I told him I would like to be, and from that point forward I had every intention of keeping my promise to him.

Shortly after I moved Laurie and Ricky into my home much to my parent's disappointment and threats of ending my work career with them, and leaving me with no income to pay my mortgage. They had their hearts set on me marrying a good Hungarian Catholic girl.

Shortly after Laurie announced she was pregnant and my parents changed their tune and quickly made arrangements for a big Catholic wedding. Our marriage only lasted two years with mutual drunkenness and several alleged bouts of infidelity on my wife's part.

This is where my drinking and living with Laurie had got me. I was twenty-three years old and I was about to end my first marriage.

Well needless to say we separated. There is much to say between the time my first wife and I separated and I sobered up but suffice to say I did no art during my first marriage or for many years after.

Several broken relationships later I sobered up at twenty-seven years old and moved in with a woman who had four kids and we had my beloved son together. Around this time I got a divorce from my first wife. As soon as our son was born I was moved out while at an art class in Surrey and I came home to my stuff on the back lawn and my partner's husband's car in the driveway.

I later applied for and received an annulment from my first marriage.

Fast forward another few years and I am volunteering at the Salvation Army Soup Kitchen. I meet my present wife Gertrude and we become friends, then best friends, falling in love and marrying on December 27 1997 In a Catholic ceremony in St. James Parish in Abbotsford. Ours was the first marriage and the only one held in the gym of the Catholic high school where we met each week for mass.

When we were dating I asked my wife if she would be willing to investigate the Catholic faith? She said she would and went to adult Catechism and became Catholic. My son from my previous relationship got baptized at the same ceremony as when my wife became Catholic. Ever since my wife met my son at Mill Lake Park she always treated him as her own child. That first day she brought badminton racquets to play with and a pad of paper to make paper airplanes with. The two of them got on famously!

We were given weekend visitations with Matthew, every Friday night to Sunday evening. Saturday mornings we got up early and took our son to Hungarian lessons and children's Catechism in Vancouver at the Hungarian Catholic Church, Our Lady Of Hungary. Every Saturday morning Gertrude would make Matty eggies in a cup and soldiers ( a piece of bread toasted and broken into small pieces with butter, cheese, and ham or salami.) While he was in his lessons Gertrude and I would go to the Wazubi Cafe and have some special mixture of herbal and fruit tea with some sort of sweet biscuit.

One day while we were dating, we were out for coffee on the patio at Muggs Coffee Shop and I asked my then-girlfriend, Gertrtrude, If we were to get married when would she like to. And she said yesterday. There was a peachy purple ski that evening and we called it our engagement sky. For years afterward, we call that kind of sky our engagement sky.

In the summer we would go to church in the morning and after mass, we would pack up the car with towels and sausages, bread, fruit, and vegetables, and head to Washington State to a lot my mother owned by a river. We would stop at a gas station along the way and pick up some cheese, hotdogs, and a case of pop. When we got to the lot we would build a fire and roast sausages and marshmallows. We brought wood and we would spend some time building a treehouse. We stayed till dark and then took Mathew home to his mother's house.

When Gertrude and I got together we would date by going to an AA meeting and go for coffee and fries at some restaurant that allowed smoking as I smoked back then. I smoked for a total of forty years, from ten years old, smoking buts I found by bus stops, to a pack a day habit in my later years. I kept trying to quit since I met Gertrude and I finally succeeded almost ten years ago now.

My wife was always supportive of my membership in Alcoholics Anonymous and has given up drinking herself in support of me and my sobriety.

Now we have been married almost twenty-four years this year 2021 in December and I will be thirty-four years sober in November. There is much more to say about our life together. One tragic event was when we had a miscarriage early in our married life. We were not able to get pregnant again.

I was in my late forties when I started taking business and computer classes at the University of the Fraser Valley here in Abbots ford. One day in an Economics lecture the professor said that the market makes sure everyone gets what they need when they need it. I went home that day very disappointed. Why didn't he just say what it actually is which is that God makes sure that everyone gets what they need when they need it.

My wife said don't worry too much about it and why don't I change my studies and study art as that is what I truly love. So I started taking drawing and painting classes and a couple of years later UFV created a Graphic and Digital Design, two-year program and I completed it and Graduated with good grades in June 2014. About seven years ago.

During this time and ever since then, I have renewed my creative endeavors, creating various types of art, digitally, traditionally, with graphite, pastels, watercolors, and acrylic paints and with photography.

I belong to the Fraser Valley Water Media Society and before Covid happened I would go to the Abbotsford Rec Center and paint with my fellow artists for three hours every Monday and Friday. Now I've been painting at home but I'm in a sort of dry spell and aside from recently touching up a painting I did a few months ago I've been more focused on writing.

The other day I got an e-mail from David Tickner, a member of the Water media society, that a fellow on Sumas Mountain was selling off the estate art supplies of his deceased wife. I called him on a Tuesday night and he said he was in Victoria but would be back Thursday and he would call me when he got back. Well, he returned on Wednesday and called me. So I e-mailed him a list of what I was interested in from his list sent to David and he said he wasn't sure what was going to be left as he had someone coming at ten am Thursday.

I asked him if I could see him at nine-thirty and he agreed so I went and spent $160.00 on approximately $460.00 worth of watercolor paints and various binders and stacks of watercolor paper. I've been wanting to do some watercolor painting and now I have the supplies to tackle it again. My wife Gertrude also gave me a list of a few items she wanted for herself.

A few years ago my Dr, Dr, Burns suggested I attend more AA meetings than my once a week. So my wife suggested I start a new meeting and meet three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays at 5 pm. we met at the Abbotsford Alano Club basement, a social club for individuals in recovery, for over two years, and since Covid, we have met on an online platform called Zoom. At one point we changed the start time to 5:30 to better accommodate the attendees and have been meeting 5:30 to 6:30 ever since.

My life is great, I love my wife. My wife loves me. I have a close-knit of supportive friends in AA, Alanon, my art society, and my church family. I belong to the St. Ann's Knights of Columbus a fraternal organization where we raise money and donate winter coats for kids and wheelchairs to those that can't afford them.

My rad sprung a leak just under the rad cap and Randy Duke from Dukes Auto and Cycle epoxied the hole and it lasted until we went to New West and back to get my AA friend Syd a 35-year medallion for his sober date June 1st this 2021.

I texted Randy and told him the rad sprung a leak same place so he told me to bring it in again and I was there today at 2 pm and his right-hand man Bill, who is in a wheelchair used a stronger epoxy which set in fifteen minutes not half an hour like the last time.

I must say I found a new mechanic as the last one I'd been going to for years tried to sell me a bunch of work I later found out I didn't need. And so far Randy and Bill are yet to charge me. I'm going to go to them for a tune-up in a couple of weeks and I will go to them for my future mechanical needs.

So life goes on and My wife and I are closer than ever we still get giddy when the other walks into the room when we're out at a meeting arriving at different times. I chair Mon. Wed. Fri. the As Bill Sees It Meeting online on Zoom. I attend an all men's stag Alanon meeting to get support for my relationships or lack of them with my parents both very judgemental and daily drinkers.

I'm creating art again or still, doing what I love is one hell of a great ride and I wouldn't have it any other way! God bless you on your journey and may you be surrounded by family and good friends, three meals a day, clothing to wear a vehicle to get around, and a home to live in, may you have a long and happy life.

extended family
Like

About the Creator

Attila Jacob Ferenczi

A writer, artist, and photographer living with his wife of almost twenty-four years, in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, Canada.

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

Sign in to comment

    Find us on social media

    Miscellaneous links

    • Explore
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Support

    © 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.