Barbara Agreste

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OK, this is going to be a new journey. You know those times when you really think that you got it all wrong or half right, and what you were supposed to do was being yourself, doing what you always liked to do. Which for me was drawing these images that came from my imagination, and that were connected to a sort of magic that came from the light playing and shining through magic creatures and surfaces. I liked being happy with glittering princess dresses, and I got inspiration from the nature in my garden and from the dolls my parents bought me. There were fairy tales books, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Snow White, Cinderella, and then the Grimm Brothers: the dark tales. Those gloomy atmospheres were the perfect representation of the darker feelings I sometimes experienced in a strange small village with strange people. So what is the point, having gone to art college, to learn cubism or minimalism, or conceptual art? Yes I knew about every art style and period, but would those teachers grant me to make the kind of art I was comfortable with? I mean should I have been myself or someone else? All my life I struggled with wanting to be like others. I looked outside, I imitated styles, I was reproached when I showed the wonder of my real fantastic imagination, I was told to do squares and triangles, to follow an art current, to be a number. I started to lose that interior light, I forgot – talked out of it – that wearing a wonderful dress, a huge one, would protect me from cold, from predators, and from the breaching of that margin of space between me and others. So we learned to draw beautiful ancient Greek statues, Venus, Apollo, their perfect bodies belonging to a time when being naked was nothing shameful, it was powerful, and their body was a sacred temple. Not today anymore. The naked body, the stripped soul of a vulnerable child, my eyes adoring my Barbie, my eyes creating and celebrating those fairies, those dresses were eventually stripped away from me when they taught me that being naked and hungry was the way to be. In a glamorous society, not in an ancient one, a modern environment devoid of Gods, being naked is something very different. You see they talked about the female body all the time, no matter if you were a rare talent: your skills didn’t matter, because as a woman it was only your body that would be of interest, your legs… The guy beside me was good at drawing, but I was just a pair of legs. I was as good as him, but he was the artist, I was nowhere as a subject, they were measuring the lenght of women’s legs and comparing them. Thank God for that art which is called “Dance” as at one point I danced my soul off in order to make sense of all of that shit, to find the real place and meaning of my body: “Where did it belong?” So I danced. Those legs brought me very far as “Zarathustra is a dancer”. I wish my parents never let me step into that kind of cultural environment where females could go to art college, but nobody would dare say to you: “you are an artist”. I wish they left me there, at home in front of the table with those pastels, pens and white sheets of paper… Forever drawing my real soul, never having to learn anything else. Fairy tale books, just give me more books. I wish I could thrive through my drawings, and nobody with the license to teach art ever told me that they were rubbish, that they weren’t the way to go. That’s what real artists do: they represent what makes them happy, they stick to their authentic self. If I wasn’t able to express myself with that medium for a long time, it was because after a while in that pre-university college I didn’t know (nobody told me) that if you do not have a space of your own, or strong boundaries, you eventually end up empty.

I’m taking back my castle.

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