Commissions are never easy, but I enjoy the challenge. Still, this particular painting was the most intimidating one yet. It’s for Regina Catrambone, a successful, strong, and beautiful woman who lives in Malta. I haven’t actually had the pleasure of meeting her in person yet, but we have friends in common and hear a lot about each other. Her family runs a successful business, Tangiers Group that is based in Valletta, Malta.
After the Lampedusa tragedy in 2013 when 400 migrants drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean sea, the Catrambones’ lives changed forever. They bought a boat, the Phoenix, and established MOAS, Migrant Offshore Aid Station, making it their daily business to take her to sea and save the lives of those who continued to struggle to cross to Europe. Since then, they attracted many more resources to their cause: international humanitarians, security professionals, medical staff, maritime officers, and even a Remote Piloted Aircraft with thermal and night imaging. To date, they have saved 11,680 people from danger at sea. So, while on the phone Regina tells me she is “just a normal person”, I know she is in fact an exceptional one. And to create a painting for her, a large-scale portrait of migrants, is a lot of pressure.
I looked through many images, including photos taken by Regina herself, and read a lot about the ongoing migrant crisis. What helped me was Regina’s faith and trust: she assured me of her complete confidence in me, allowing me to take the painting in any direction. She encouraged me to find a personal way to relate to these desperate people, and in the midst of our conversation, I remembered a story my father had told me from his childhood.
My father was born in April of 1941 in Russia, in the city of Murmansk, on a peninsula in the Northern Sea. Being on the arctic tundra, trees there don’t grow taller than a few feet, and the dark polar night lasts months. My father was just a tiny baby when the Nazis invaded Russia in June of 1941. Murmansk was heavily bombed by the Nazis, and my grandmother decided that water was safer than land. She grabbed her baby boy (my father) and, along with many other desperate mothers and children, fled in a large open barge pulled by a weak motorboat into the White Sea, running away from her home and to the unknown. A Nazi fighter plane found them and fired its machine guns at them from the skies; they had nowhere to hide, and so half of the women and children arrived to their destination dead. But my grandmother and my father made it! They stayed away for 5 years and returned to their home in Murmansk after the war. My grandfather had gone to war at the onset and was killed in March of 1945 near the end of the war, in Budapest, and so never returned home to see his son.
“Nobody puts their kids on the boat, unless the water is safer than land”. We all want a future for our children, and for some of us it’s literally a matter of life or death. In my painting, I didn’t want to show the horrors or desperation, but a glimpse of hope. The people I painted do not look free or rested – they have been through much and will go through even more before they can enjoy even the simple daily pleasures most of us take for granted. But they are alive, and they know what that is worth. My painting is a surprise for Regina, so I can’t reveal it now, but it will be delivered to her next month, and then I will share the full image of it. I am excited! I am happy with it; I am even a little sad that it’s finished.
However, I can’t resist… here is a tiny glimpse of certain details:
wrote this lovely story of how we met and what DC felt like 16 years ago. He is publishing a book with my painting on the cover:
Anna Demovidova - Artist Blog 