A Maltese proverb flashes a red light to those men about to retire from work: Raġel id-dar taġen fuq in-nar, the proverb goes, which, literally translated, would read: ‘A man at home is like a pan over a hot stove’.
Once a man retires and spends endless hours at home, the chances are that the wife would start nagging: “Do this, do that. Go buy this and that and don’t spend too much. Don’t sit there doing nothing. Go clean the washroom. Take the dog out for a walk, feed the cat.”
This is how watercolourist Paul Caruana describes one of his 20 works he is exhibiting at Palazzo De Piro in Mdina. The show titled Seeing Voices, Ilħna li Nara transports viewers to how life turned out in the early 1970s.
It was inaugurated by President Emeritus Ugo Mifsud Bonnici last Friday.
Asked about the way he paints, Caruana notes. “I paint what I feel. Sometimes I sketch first. Sometimes I don’t. I may start with a finger that morphs into a hand, that grows into a person, that transforms into a whole scene in a couple of hours. Painting can be lonely.”
Why? “Because I usually paint at night and I’m dying to have my wife – who is sleeping in the other room – next to me. Which reminds me of the Spanish spellbinding impressionist, Joaquin Sorolla, who used to write to his wife telling her how much he misses her when away from home and wishing she was there beside him. It’s sharing the pain, the doubts, the unanswered questions.”
Why are Ċensu ż-Żatat and Ġaħan featured in this exhibition? “These folk characters captivate me. I often ask myself: haven’t we, at some time or other attempted a challenge we knew was beyond us? The same goes for the Ġaħan syndrome. Haven’t we someday, somehow, stuck to the letter rather than the spirit of the law? That’s Ċensu ż-Żatat and Ġaħan for you.”
Ġaħan is the simpleton who took words too literally. He jerks the door off its jamb and carts it away to church where his mother is hearing Mass, to the congregation’s bewilderment. Ġaħan, may quite reasonably ask: “It was mum who asked me to pull the door behind me. What wrong have I done?”
“The exhibition bears the title Seeing Voices, Ilħna li Nara because certain voices I hear conjure neighbours of yesteryear. That’s where I got the inspiration for these watercolours”, Caruana said.
Another painting shows Toni, il-Gundulaj, a wirey, weather-beaten man who used to dive for rocks, ferry them ashore on his fregatina, break up the rocks with a stone chisel and a hammer to fish out the dates from their limestone bed. Dates that tasted of the invigorating sea.
Seeing Voices, Ilħna li Nara at Palazzo De Piro in Mdina runs until October 31.