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FAME
Curiosity, temptation, or experience?
As a child, I often listened to conversations about fame. My stepfather spoke of it as if it were a promise waiting just beyond the horizon.
“You will see,” he would say, not quite predicting, not quite threatening. “I will become very famous after my death. Just like so many painters before me.”
He lived among ghosts — Velázquez, Goya — men who had suffered, struggled, and were finally understood too late. Their stories nourished him. He believed in them the way others believe in religion.
At the time, I did not know whether his longing for fame came from being overlooked or from a deeper conviction that true art could only be recognized in retrospect. He worked as a freelance painter, stubbornly devoted to his vision. He refused commissions that felt too easy, too decorative, too commercial. To him, selling oneself was a quiet kind of betrayal.
“An artist must suffer,” he insisted. “Poverty, discipline, solitude — this is the path.”
He spoke with a certain contempt about those who succeeded too easily. Fame, if it came too early, was suspect. Recognition, if it brought comfort, was impure.
He never kept track of the paintings he sold. They disappeared into private homes, crossed borders, vanished into lives we would never know.
