I once bragged to my mother-in-law about my son's (her grandson's) success in drawing. We were in a drawing club at the time. She responded that it wasn't surprising, he took after his grandfather. I chimed in that yes, my grandfather had studied at the Academy of Arts, but my mother-in-law replied, "Well, that means he takes after his great-grandfather and grandfather (my father-in-law)."
I'd never heard of my father-in-law drawing. My mother-in-law replied that he'd gotten it into his head and buried his talent. Maybe he would have achieved something. Artists make good money; he could have painted for commissions even in retirement. Naturally, I pestered her for an explanation.
And my mother-in-law told me this story.
My father-in-law had drawn everything and everyone since childhood. From life and imagination, even though he grew up in the village. And even though he had no formal training, his drawings were very professional. He didn't study to be an artist, as his parents thought it was a waste of time.
He enrolled in evening classes at the institute and got married in his first year. And, in addition to working at the factory, he took odd jobs through acquaintances—drawing, painting portraits from photographs...
One time, someone offered to paint a portrait-painting-sketch (I don't know what to call it) for a monument from a small passport photo.
He painted it, and not only the clients liked it. Through these clients, he was found by an artist working at a cemetery, who himself turned down the job, and offered him the chance to draw sketches. The artist then transferred them to monuments. He paid pennies, but the "employer" apparently decided to dump all the paperwork on him, so the quantity was quite substantial. He worked like that for several years, then the cemetery artist started drinking, and their work together gradually petered out.
He didn't tell anyone at home that he was painting the dead. He only revealed that later.
One day, he came to visit his parents for a vacation and wanted to paint a portrait of his mother. He painted a life-size, full-length oil painting, a truly magnificent one. The entire village flocked to see it. Even the village chairman and the agronomist came to admire it. They were so impressed that the agronomist wanted a group portrait of the entire family, while the chairman wanted a design for the honor board and the propaganda corner. So, he fulfilled the chairman's request, capturing the agronomist's family in sketches and taking the painting home to finish.
Literally a month later, my father-in-law had to return to the village for his mother's funeral. And when he returned on vacation, he brought the agronomist's finished family portrait.
The client was very pleased; the portrait was beyond praise. Fellow villagers flocked to see it. The agronomist was so pleased that he even held an open house.
Afterward, they shared their impressions: "They looked so real," "I was really scared: I opened the door, and there they were all sitting across from me." And then, lo and behold, it's a painting...
Then my father pestered me: "You painted my mother, she's standing there so lifelike, paint me next to her." He painted a similarly huge portrait of my father.
He went home, and a while later my father called:
"The agronomist and his whole family were in a car accident."
They went to the funeral.
They brought out the coffins of the adults and the children, and then the relatives brought out a huge portrait of the happy family and placed it in front. The crowd recoiled.
The old women started whispering something behind his back about a cursed painting.
He returned home not quite himself. His mother-in-law says he started blaming himself and kept repeating that he'd already painted my father too.
Apparently, bad rumors had spread through the village. My father called, worried. He said the propaganda corner had been burned down. Less than a year had passed, and a telegram arrived announcing my father's death. My father-in-law wasn't even surprised, only saying, "I told you so." It was the same story at the funeral. There was a coffin in the house, and life-size portraits of his mother and father against the wall, as if they were alive. He saw them and went into hysterics. He threw himself at the paintings, while his brothers held him back.
The old ladies whispered behind his back again, comparing, listing—his mother, the agronomist and his family, his father...
He came home completely depressed. He announced he'd never pick up a pencil again. He told me about the half-baked projects he'd done for the monuments. He thought those sketches of the dead were the cause. He started remembering how many portraits he'd painted for unknown people, through friends of friends, and who knows what had happened to them.
They couldn't remember whether any of the deceased had died before those half-baked projects for the cemetery. But he'd never painted such large, realistic portraits before, so maybe that was the reason.
I also asked, "Didn't he ever draw you or the children?"
To which my mother-in-law replied, "I did pencil sketches, but no oils... the shoemaker, as always, has no shoes."
By the way, I loved to draw landscapes—alien ones, with distorted perspective (or, I don't know how to describe them, I'm just repeating my mother-in-law's words), frightening ones. My mother-in-law said she always turned them toward the wall, it made her feel uneasy. And if she looked at them for too long, her head would start to ache to the point of nausea. But the landscapes were popular with a certain circle, and they were quickly bought and snapped up.
My mother-in-law recalled one unpleasant incident: before their marriage, my father-in-law and my mother-in-law were friends with a female artist.
My father-in-law drew this "landscape." My mother-in-law saw it and described it vividly to me. I tried to imagine it, but I couldn't understand or visualize it. A huge white moon,If you look closely, you can see a distinct, small figure, surrounded by a paler halo. Up close, there are tiny specks of different shades. These specks create the impression that it's enormous, convex, and in motion. Ahead, the sea—a moonlit path (also made of specks)—transitions to a road on a cliff, all at such an angle that you can tell it's a cliff, but at the same time, the road seems to continue into the moonlit path. On the sea is a large paper boat made of checkered paper, seemingly touching the cliff's edge, but that can't be real. It also appears to be floating on water, but the top somehow looks at the viewer, which simply can't be true. The perspective is distorted, yet somehow realistic. This, as my mother-in-law said, gives me a headache. And along the road, a lone naked girl with long hair covering her nakedness seems to be walking (without touching the road with her feet). It's drawn in such a way that the girl is simultaneously on a cliff and on a moonlit path. It's incomprehensible how this girl is drawn. If you look closely, it looks like she's made of broken pieces, but if you don't go into detail, she's both on the moonlit path and on the cliff, and it seems to be moving (I can't imagine how anyone could draw it like that). It's all in the white-greenish moonlight, and it's very frightening, very realistic. The lighting also somehow changed her, making her come alive, or something (according to her words). My mother-in-law didn't like the painting, but the artist was delighted. She said it was her, and the painting was about her, and begged for it as a gift. She hung this horror in her room.
A couple of weeks later, the friends were visiting the artist and witnessed a nightmarish scene. The girl was sitting on the couch, gazing thoughtfully at the painting. The boys were chatting at the table over tea and cake. Suddenly, the girl jumped up, grabbed a knife from the table, and began slashing and slashing at the painting in a wild rage. They tried to calm her down, but then blood simply gushed from her nose. Everyone was frightened, and they threw the painting away. The girl couldn't explain why she behaved this way.
And then came the final incident, which decided everything.
He had a close friend, a friend from childhood, from the same village, and then from the same department and year at the same university. His friend tried to calm him down, shame him, and beg him not to bury his talent and at least paint proper landscapes and still lifes. But the father-in-law flatly refused, saying that even the apples and vases he had painted would bring misfortune.
One day, the friend began to argue that it was all a fabrication and self-hypnosis. He forced his father-in-law to paint his portrait and verify that it was all a coincidence.
The father-in-law gave in to his persuasion.
And how did it all end?
A year later, my friend died of leukemia.
Words cannot describe what happened to the artist. My mother-in-law said she thought he would follow his friend or go crazy. He would sit up all night and draw his portrait. He punished himself or even killed himself. He must have drawn a hundred of them.
Then he collected everything: old paintings, sketches, brushes, paints, and burned them all in a vacant lot.
From then on, he never even drew a Christmas tree for his children's sketchbooks.
I was shocked by her story. I didn't even know what to say. My mother-in-law was sure it was all just a coincidence. But I felt uneasy, so many coincidences... My mother-in-law also said of his surrealist paintings that "only a person with a mental disorder could draw something like that." I could already tell my father-in-law was an extraordinary individual (his phenomenal memory, as everyone joked, was "like a spy": he could memorize tables, graphs, charts, and formulas in a couple of minutes, just by looking at them). I won't even mention the notebook in his head with all the dates and phone numbers. He had two higher education degrees, held leadership positions, and then he gave it all up and went to sea. He was a bit eccentric, but I never noticed any mental lapses or "breakdowns" in him.