Martin Guderna  - 15 July 2023

That excellent on-line dictionary of the Spanish Language (Real Academia Española) defines obsession in Spanish as:

obsesión

Del lat. obsessio, -ōnis 'asedio'.

 1. f. Perturbación anímica producida por una idea fija.

 2. f. Idea fija o recurrente que condiciona una determinada actitud.

Obsession has been in my thoughts of late as I scan my plants every day and place them into two exterior hard drives knowing that I have over 3000 of them and that there is no practical reason for continuing except that I have fun doing it.

The idea of obsession first came to me (now in retrospect) when my mother had me take art lessons with an English artist named Robin Bond in Mexico City in 1955 when I was 13. Bond had been a camouflage expert in London during the war and in Mexico City he designed sets for Televisa, the Mexican TV company. He knew what colours to paint his sets and how they would look on b+w TV.

Every time I went for my classes there was a different woman there. When Bond painted he mixed his paints on the walls. The whole house was an array of painted walls and many ashtrays. Not much memory of the man is left on the internet but I can trust my own that indeed he did exist.

It took a while before I met another obsessed person. This was at the end of the 20^th century here in Vancouver. My friend, Argentine painter Juan Manuel Sánchez painted women every day of his life. He told me that he was in search of the essence of a woman. He would start with a blank canvas. He said as he stared at it, that his thoughts were about resolving that problem of that essential woman as Plato would have defined her. I mentioned once if some day he would put a dot in the middle of the canvas and quit as that would be the problem’s resolution. With a smile he said that was a possibility.

Juan Manuel Sánchez - a man obsessed

I believe I have met a third person that is obsessed. This is my friend the Czechoslovakian painter Martin Guderna.      

Guderna may be the only person I can call after 10 in the evening. In  that past with Sánchez I could have called him at midnight.

In our last last Wednesday meeting at the Sylvia with photographers, Guderna drew a portrait on a napkin. Before I took it to be framed I had him sign it.

Guderna paints until the early hours of the morning. In my last visit to his downtown studio and apartment he showed me works that reminded me of the photographic process called the halftone. It was this process that ushered in the printing of photographs in periodicals beginning in the mid-1870s. That the first photograph was one of the Steinway Building in a NY newspaper, attests that photography, the arts and writing worked together until the slow demise of journalism that is happening right now.

Guderna’s “halftones” are laborious. I told him that I was equally obsessed with my plant scans but that doing them was far easier than his works.  I did explain that since I have been scanning plants since 2001 I am good at it. He smiled and agreed.