Thirteen Years Ago

Silver was the morning air outside of Lisbon that day. Along the quay between Estoril and Cascais, the flagstone walk by the sea was still damp from the high tide. The cafés were just opening for the day, white-aproned waiters wiped off the tables with dirty rags, the cooks fired up the grills where the whole fishes would be roasted for lunch.
Earlier that December day, I had been in the center of that crumbling city. After breakfast, I took one of the piglet trams down Rua Misericordia, past the Chiado District to the Cais do Sodre, the little station from which trains left every 20 minutes, following the Tagus River to the sea. I climbed into a near-empty car, sat by the window and watched the river widen to the gulf. 20 minutes later, I got off near the end of the line, by the castle in Estoril.
1994.
The glimmering morning of an early December day. I walked along the wide, flagstone promenade by the sea; all was quiet. One, and then another old man with nothing better to do than fish into the waves of the receding sea; an old woman walking a dog. The Estoril casino was shuttered; any beachwalkers were still in bed, or back in Lisbon.
I was going to make it!
I sat in a just-opened café, ordered an espresso and watched the sea foam breach the wall and splay out over the walkway. I had just been offered the strangest art event of my life and I was certain, 13 years ago almost to this day that I had “made it.” I wrote a poetic letter to a friend, the delicate fragrance of the hot coffee wafting into the silvery light; I composed odes about myself in my head.
I was to spend three weeks painting in the storefront of an unrented store in the Espacio Chiado, a high-end shopping mall in downtown Lisbon. Nestled on the uphill between the Baixa (lower city) and Barrio Alto (the upper, older part of the city that wasn’t destroyed and the rebuilt after the great conflagration of 1755), the Chiado district was home to some of the hippest retail and nicest Soho-style design stores in this butt-end European capital; the mall itself, a chrome and marble splendor, actually had exposed within it, a piece of the 12th century Arab wall that had once protected Lisbon, which had been excavated and then encased in glass, on the lower level of the edifice.

"Akbar Muhammadi," oil on canvas, 60" x 36", 2007

Indeed! Three glorious weeks as the featured artist in an “Atelier do Natal,” working my magic on large, wood-slatted paintings as crowds of Christmas shoppers passed by my spot, hard-by one of the entrances to the mall. All would see the process of a true artist; surely, the press would come, paintings would sell, I would be discovered and sucked up into the European art world, a 31 year-old “comer” unleashed on the capitals of the Old World.
I sat and dreamed by the sea that day; the sun rose higher in the sky and thinned out the silvery, salty air. Clarity overtook the day, the sea foam fought with the wafting smells of the reddening charcoal. A delivery of potatoes and kale; the Caldo Verde soup was put on to boil. The smell of the Portuguese chorizo mixed in with the salt. A vague smell of fish rot washed in off the sea, and dissipated.
I dreamed over the small coffee. All of my hard work! All of the time in that unheated studio over the fish store back in Caceres, Spain, the small provincial capital in the middle of the desert, where I lived. My decision to turn my back on the United States, move to a country where I didn’t speak the language, live as an illegal alien – all of it appeared to be the right move, as I sat there, teetering resplendently on the precipice of fame and fortune.
That was thirteen years ago.
And now, today, in my suburban office off the back of the master bedroom, overlooking a fenced, winter backyard (nearly half of the 15th hundredths of an acre that define my land), my wife and two children performing their late afternoon chores out in the family room – now right now I sit waiting (still) for some shove some imperceptible event that will truly, finally mark me as a comer, as a new art voice, as someone “important” within the narrow spectrum of this art world, this America, this still-born dream I am still dreaming from more than a decade ago.
And at 44, still young?
(And thirteen years from now? Still waiting? Still on the edge of a certain type of precipice?)