Ink painting
He often made pencil sketches while lying in bed. At first glance, they looked like a child’s doodle, half of a sheet of construction paper carelessly filled in with black, but they were the view from the large bedside window.
His wife did not like them very much and said, “They look like Scenery of Afterlife.” I said, “I like them because they look like ink paintings.”
I wanted to take photos that resembled his landscape paintings, so I sometimes took photos through the large window. With a little touch-up, the photos I took through the thoroughly dirty window looked like his landscape paintings.
His name was JORGE, and he had come from the countryside to this Mexico City for cancer treatment. His wife, FATIMA, was taking care of him while living with him in a hotel room with a large window. It seemed to be almost a month now, and he had about a hundred landscape paintings.
When winter was turning into spring, I returned from a short trip and MIGUEL at the front desk told me, “JORGE and FATIMA just left the hotel, but they said ‘Thank you. Goodbye.'” I regretted that I should have asked Jorge to give me some landscape paintings.
