Gábriel Ajna

DSC_5756“ I knocked about the world, having lived in several places: Ireland, Morocco, Egypt. Where did you travel? We always lived far from both the campus and my atelier. Spending hours sitting on the tram. It is enough to go crazy. You also had to commute a lot? I had a very hard life. Painting by day, working at a café by night. You also had to work a lot? But you were not as very sick as me, were not you?” We are talking like confidential close friends, not seeing each other for ages. She talks, and then asks. She waits patiently, listening with wide-open eyes. I do not take notes.

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“When I suffered a stroke, I died.” Had this stroke happened 15 years ago, they could not have saved her. The bohemia came together, and, organized by the MissionArt Gallery, each of nearly 50 artists offered a picture. The proceeds covered the rehabilitation. No one can understand how she was not forced into a wheelchair. She could hardly to speak for two years, just drawing. But half a year ago she bought a porcelain ballet dancer doll. “I am living”, she said. She talks as before and paints again.
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She has many friends whom she painted.  Already at the university, having a few free hours, her friends, painters and actors, even her professor, posed before her. “They are so good to me even now, helping me a lot to recover.”

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“Sickness, death, fear” is the title of a picture, what she painted a few years before her illness. That time she created a series of ‘Hospital Box Installation’ presenting the events that have occurred later. Experiences, self-fulfilling prophecies, mere visions, or coincidence of unrelated haphazard? It is unambiguous for those living in this situation.

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A month before her illness she had an exhibition titled ‘Transcendent Angels’. 23 paintings of angels. And now she is sure that she owes her recovery to the angels. But she is sure as well, that she never wants to exhibit only angels.

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Her little room is inhabited by rococo bric-a-bracs of her grandmother. They give purpose and meaning to her new life, until, finally, she will have a normal studio again. Her best place is Balatonszemes, a little village at the Lake Balaton. Before the disease she painted the water, but their house now, because it gives security.
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Her family wanted him to be a doctor. And she was obedient. She did so well at the school contest of physics, that she was entered to a famous high school, to the physics/biology major without any matriculation. But when she needed to dissect a terrible eye, she was taken bad. Fortunately, the art teacher noticed her talent in drawing.

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