Several years ago, while returning from a visit to her birthplace in Hungary, Andrea de Kerpely-Zak and her husband had to wait in a long line at the border. To occupy the time she strolled in a roadside grove, bidding farewell to the beloved forests like those for which she felt such fond attachment on the estates of her noble ancestors. She could not resist gathering a handful of the purple and yellow wildflowers. They seemed to turn the sadness of leaving into the joyous celebration of anticipated return.
At that moment, though she did not know it yet, her career as a painter, pursued since she was a girl under teachers in many countries, took a new turn. With a brush almost brimming with the wild juices of the stray blossoms themselves, she made a watercolor of the spray. It was like no other flower-painting previously seen. The first time I saw it, and on each repeated viewing, it seemed to me the flowers had painted themselves! Their voices were like tiny bells in an enchanted midsummer night's dream. Their stems tangled and untangled like the flying ribbons round a phantom maypole.
From that time on, Andrea became the patron-princess of wildflowers. Back home in Arizona, she began to sprinkle blossoms native to the desert, and grasses and flowerlets of other moister lands on her watercolor papers. Blossoms of every color and shape, more delicate than butterflies, spilled from her brushes with informal abandon.
One day, after seeing Andrea's latest florals, I suddenly realized that the master flower-paintings of the past, had always controlled the blossoms with cruel iron collars of vases and bowls; jailed them indoors on table tops, and cramped them in bouquets which allowed them no breathing space. Even the pulsing irises and sunflowers of Van Gogh, which I had always loved as a cry from an anguished heart, began to seem wounded and hurt in their stiff desperation. And the less impassioned, less brutalized clusters painted by Chagall and Redon, though plucked from enchanted gardens, were confined in ritual cribs like captured children.
Andrea's blossoms, on the contrary, bable in a new tongue. She does not stare at them as if they were on the stage or behind glass. Nor slice into them with long analytical blades like Georgia O'Keeffe. Instead, she joins them, translating their own gestures into spontaneous brush-strokes. Miraculously she borrows their own colors for this rite, as if freed, somehow, of the distorting opacities of paint. Nothing in Andrea's fluid stems and petals seem to have come out of a tube. Her strokes, moreover, are not the clever calligraphy of Orientals, ritualizing plum blossoms and bamboo. Her flowers and leaves and stems play against the white paper with the natural calligraphy of the flowers themselves.
I was not surprised to learn, when I saw her most recent series of "African" daisies, those orange-yellow star-bursts that quilt the flowerbeds and slopes of spring in Arizona, that she sat outdoors surrounded by them on all sides when she reported their adventures with her brushes. The viewer of her pictures can join her there. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he can take a flower's-eye-view, untroubled by horizon lines or still-life shadow boxes, or the sterile scenery of household interiors. He will need only the eternal impulse of the spirit to identify with nature's loveliest delights on their own level.
When Andrea first visited my neighborhood, I discovered another facet of her capacity to hold a new kind of communion with flowers. As we strolled about among suburban lawns, her eyes saw only blossoms. A half block away her honeybee eye plucked out of the masses of shrubbery only the flowers. For her, walls and windows and trunks of trees did not exist. She saw only the feathered fuzz of the mimosa, the festival jubilee of a Mexican bird-of-paradise flower, and, most astonishing of all, the single tiny yellow gold piece still topping a nest of long curved needles on my own palo-verde tree. Two weeks ago it had been a thirty-foot bouquet of dazzling gold. Now only this one flower remained. But Andrea's unerring eye, in some mystic floral radar-beam, unknown to most mortals, homed-in on it as if it were a long lost child.
She touched the graceful spray of needles and looked at me with her great flowerlike dark eyes, and innocently scolded: "I should think you would want to paint it." How could I confess? Until she championed this minuscule rearguard of a neglected floral minority, I had never noticed the individual blossoms on this dazzling southwestern tree. It had lived in my own front yard, acknowledged by my insensitive eyes, only when it shouted in full chorus.
Another revealing experience which open-ed my eyes to Andrea's art took place at her home in Phoenix. After she had tucked her year-old baby into bed, her four older children, ranging in age from two-and-one-half to twelve, unlimbered their violins and played quartets for me, with gusto and charm. Thaddeus, the youngest, scraped his drone-tone lustily, putting his back into it like an elfin Heifitz, while his good-natured sisters faithfully followed the score. There was more than music in this enchanted air! There was a flowering of the inner ear.
Like Andrea's wildflowers, there were no big awkward blossoms here. Her flower-children, were voicing the little people of the whole blooming world. Later perhaps, as adults, they would analyze the harmony and counterpoint of flower - music, as Georgia O'Keeffe does, closeup or inside a giant calyx. But now they perform pure wildflowers. Their tones, like Enesco's Rumanian Rhap-sody, or Moussorgsky's Ballad of the Little Chicks in their Shells, or the meadow breezes of Bartok, had some of the squeaks and dis-sonances of true folk music. There were no stately Wagnerian lillies, no unfolding Brahmsian roses, no bloody Beethovan ger-aniums or gaudy parades of Lisztian holly-hocks. But one could catch quick hidden glimpses of Mozartian mignionette, Scarlatti snapdragons, and fleeting whispers of Tschaikowsky's Valse des Fleurs.
Joy is the sound of this life gambol, whether it is Andrea's brushes or her fiddle-happy children calling the tune. In her, one senses the graphic expression of Wordsworth's famous "Lines Written in Early Spring".
Indeed, in Andrea's art you discover with new wonderment, that Love's Labor is never Lost. As Shakespeare himself, in that earliest of his poems put it you really only live ....