Dominique Appia (My Grandfather in Geneva)

Today I want to write about my grandfather in Geneva (I have two grandfathers, one in Geneva, Switzerland and one in Tucson, Arizona [about whom I will dedicate another post [he keeps the batteries going {in fact, I’ll write about my grandmothers too <4 posts, total>}]).

My grandfather in Geneva paints.  He also loves to speak and to write.  And he likes good food, and to travel.  And he likes humanity, history, language, psychology, architecture, art, music, wine, women, Gitanes and probably a whole lot of other things that I haven’t had the chance to share with him.  He likes life.  While that may be a simplistic characterization, it well sums up my understanding of him.  His influence upon me is immense.  I am a different person with different influences, as well, but in subtle and obvious ways, I am an evolution of his character (in a different time and place [culture]).

If one were to view human personalities as consisting of some finite number of characterizable versions (let’s say 23, for the sake of concreteness [chromosomes]), and one were also to say that which was dominant in a person was passed through genetic-environmental codetermination… well, let’s just say that my grandfather in Geneva’s personality is the 1 of 23 that I inherited.  The 1 of 23 that, like fish in a river, swam through my parents’ DNA and slithered through time into me. (But I have another majority vote, too [do we all have two majority votes?])  And we slip through time, carrying the flame (read here too, for further embedded resonances).

My grandfather paints.  That is what I have known him to do since I have known him.  This is perhaps my favorite painting, although I include another favorite right after.

I see many things in here.  There we are, our souls listening to one another, separated by the sea.  His daughter, my mother sleeping.  Psychological things.  Personal things.  Archetypal things.  Also, family things.  Sometimes I think this painting…  An arrangement of meanings most something.  The title: Enter the Secret and the Danger (Entre le Secret et le Danger).  I don’t know that I should really discuss it.  I’ll decide.

Between the Gaps(Gasps) in Memory (Entre les trous de la memoire):

This one certainly speaks to me, too.  It uses the language of our family.  At least it speaks that way to me.

Check out: www.appia-d.ch (the website was created by my Mom and this is hers) for more paintings.

I will give a brief biography.  A fuller biography is in order, and I will begin work immediately.  Consider this the first outline.

My grandfather was born 1926.  He remembers World War 2 in Switzerland.  Switzerland was neutral, but not unaffected.  Food was rationed and at night windows were covered so that buildings did not provide targets to bombers.  We’re talking Geneva, which is like 16 kilometers from the French border.  After the war there was a economic surge.  Architects were in great demand.  My grandfather had not gone to school for architecture, nor had he really architected before.  But he walked in for an interview and got the job and learned on the job.  What he did know how to do was paint.  To think geometrically.

Perhaps he would have pursued painting as a career from the start, but when he was in his teens and he asked an influential person what he thought of his art, the man said ‘non‘, or some such:  he discouraged.

So my grandfather was an architect for many years, and eventually taught architecture, too.  But in the mid sixties he had what is crudely known as a midlife crisis. He began to paint again.  And he never stopped.  He paints to this day.  He is married to Anne Mathil for 30 years.  He has three daughters and four grandchildren and one brother.

His daughter who is my mother moved to America in the 70s, had me in the 80s, and moved back to Switzerland in the 00s.

My grandfather has a very intimate relation with European culture.  He speaks of Napolean as if he’d almost seen him marching down the avenue.  I can’t remember everything that he has said, but it has all been abstracted into the perception of a really super deep relation to a cultural essence.  He knows Europe.  Has lain with her and fought her and does so to this day.  He helps satisfy her desires and define them.

There is so much more to his life.  To me it is like a vast mystery.  Yet, I understand it too.  It is second nature to me.  Perhaps, with my grandfather, it is less what he did than how he lived.  It is thus for all of us, finally.  He lives the good life.

His being radiates across the ocean.  Europe radiates across the ocean.  Through him I have encountered a beingness that I would not likely have encountered.  That few encounter over the long term, the time required to exert the most subtle influences.  What I mean is that my grandfather has shown me the possibility of deeply relating to a living cultural seed that one also helps to plant as part of loving it.

He has shown me the side of intellectuality that loves.  I mean this in terms of emotional love.  The feeling of it.  A kind of love that I can achieve, too.  A kind of love that is natural to me.  A free-spirited love.  (When I get home from this trip I will include more paintings, and words, and perhaps this shall grow into a real biography)

What leaks through his paintings into me is the complicated, abstract, magical juxtaposition of a few understandable elements.  This characterizes my writing (I imagine).  I don’t build too elaborate of constructions.  There are usually 3-4-5 elements, sometimes 2, rarely 1.  They work in concert, often meeting for the first time.  Their true awareness of their changing context.  Like good travelers between cultures who never engender enough friction to erupt to the surface (at least that much of humanity is grasped).

If you look deeply, into each of the paintings above, there is a crisis at work.  In fact, it is often operating directly at the surface.  But it does not disturb anyone.  It is seamless within its context.  My grandfather’s paintings are very psychological, in my opinion.  Of course, I have heard this growing up, too.  That he is appreciated among some psychologists or psychiatrists, or both.  But I can feel it for myself, too.  I see these as the products of a mature modern human being.