Giclee print

14” x 19 ½” (available also in smaller or bigger sizes)

Original painting – gouache, watercolors and ink on Arches paper

Original size 16 ½” x 22 ½”

I’ve loved the Craik Friendship quote (mistakenly ascribed to George Eliot in many places) for many years. When I found the quote about friendship in a letter by the extraordinary Jewish writer Bruno Schulz (who was also a painter, and was murdered by a Nazi officer in 1942 in his town of Drohobycz, Poland), I decided these two quotes might be good together in a painting.

(On a personal note, many times in my life, I hesitated whether to reveal a weakness to a new person with whom I wanted to be friends. In all such occasions, when I did reveal my weakness, it paid off and became the basis for a strong and long-lasting friendship.)

Here are the quotes:

Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts, nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

Dinah M. Craik

[…] it’s good that you aren’t perfect […] people’s weakness delivers their souls to us, makes them needy. That loss of an electron ionizes them and renders them suitable for chemical bonding. Without flaws they would stay locked within themselves, not needing anything. It takes vices to give them flavor and attraction.

Bruno Schulz in a letter to his friend Tadeusz Breza, 1934.

From the book Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz, translated by Walter Arndt,

Harper and Row Publishers

The painting tries to hint at the process described by Schulz as “ionization”, the transfer of an electron from one atom to another, which binds the two atoms into one molecule.

The patterns around the two “atoms” are all made of geometrical shapes interconnected to create two or more different shapes.

This print has been printed in the giclée technique, by Tony Molatore of The Berkeley

Giclee, on an archival 100% rag paper. Colors are non-fading, for at least 85 years.