It is an abstract oil painting type work on canvas 50×70 cm, multi-layer type, built by overlapping several surfaces containing different ideas. Ideas hide one another, revealing moments and interpretations from the past down to the surface layers. They add extra excitement, mystery and story from the author’s imagination.
The idea and story behind the painting
They are simple and profound at the same time.
In the beginning it was an abstraction of the tree of life. Following the curved lines of some branches, stylization from the tree of life and having a blood background, it confusedly bore over the golden wooden body a tree with inflorescences, curves, velvety lines, fruits, totems, symbols, segments contrasting in meaning and color with the tree in the center eternal re-born of life, cyclicity, vivacity, fading time.
They are naive lines on a reddish background similar to the arterial and venous vasculature of the brain. Above this tree, an abstracted, disfigured face of a stroke patient took shape. He was left with a hemiplegia and other neurological conditions.
In the video you can see his cranial vessels re-vascularized after endo-vascular treatment. Finally, the cranial vasculature takes shape as well as his face begins to fill with color and shades of blue and warm color mixes, and the thread of life and pulsation is reborn through the orange, shrill cough left on the canvas from the painting knife.
Finally, the face of the Brain Tree Man
Only a sleeping eyelid is discernible finds its silence, speechlessness, a song of deep, alienated, healing sleep.
The shades of blue are a deafening symphony of a great mute, brain and soul mixed together, like ink like a cello in the water of the mind, surrounded by violins, harps and the chorus of androgynous neurons, like tenors excited by Verdi’s score.
He had large palms, furrowed by more lines than life lines, some going obliquely, perpendicularly, marking crossroads, or just rest breaks with a glass of spritz in the shade and coolness of the entrance hall of the house. He mixed the wine he had made and the soda in a stemless glass, a greenish-yellow color like the sun smeared with a brush of wet grass, mixed with his bare forefinger, sunk to the meta-carpo-phalanx, and then wiped by lips listening as the dioxide bubbles still burst. Many times I would put my face close to this freshly siphoned liquid and listen to the little artesian fountain and the play of sprays that shot up from the glass, wetting my nose or ear.
The skin of his hands, the inside of his elbow, his neck, his face, and his back all smelled of sun, rust, hay, dry wood, tomato leaves from the hedge, and bruised stone all at the same time. I never heard him when he got up, at least at sunrise, when the roosters and dogs of the neighbors were crowing and barking at each other, and I knew he was going into the garden in the cool to water the seedlings. Quietly, he stretched a hose from the yard to the bottom of the garden, sat on a stool from the shed, gray of dry wood, or the one painted the color of the floors, reddish, bordeaux stuck in the path and looked through the plants, leaves and roots with water. Change the color of the dry soil at the base of any thirsty stem.
If the ground was hard, the water didn’t enter at all and made little puddles that joined other puddles, uniting the plants in thirsty, related brotherhoods, with little leaves, little hairy cilia desperate to get big, to grow, to give birth to fruit , the vegetables, to burst their little smelly vesicles which spread their perfume through the air, clinging, floating and jumping with their long magnetic hands, like cheerful chimpanzees ready to mate.
The watering was a meditation before the glorious sunrise, when the rustle of the palm-sized leaves of the vine was the only music at the bottom of the garden. Watering the plants, he slowly moved his stool down, like a child, from the distance, towards the yard, making dozens of stops, dozens of moments of the trench of the water flow, with a rustle that filled the glass of the earth with the summer spritz offered to the thirsty dying man.
Pulling towards the house, he looked up at the light that grew by a gram a minute among the leaves of the apple trees, plucked the dry twigs of the plums that were going to leave all their old and sweet-sour, violet tears, like a jam, on the ground, and even if you made magic for generations you still had to abandon a whole carpet of plums on the floor. These followed a whole day and night cycle of sweetening, rotting and drying, feeding the earth from which they came until in the fall, as many thousands of dry kernels cracked under your soles, as if they had never had fruit pulp on them. Some are still hiding centimeters under the ground, others more insensible have given birth to other twigs and mini-plum trees that littered and suffocated the ground.
In the middle of the garden like a totem in a jungle of chaotic vegetation lived a hair with 2 trunks. One like a gymnast sitting on her back in extension almost falling, but with many twisted branches, towards the sky. The other, with a body bursting almost horizontally to the right, horizontal like a bench, like a table, like a horse’s body, after which it found its glory towards the azure through thousands of branches from thick to thinner and thinner, vertical like some antennas magnetized by the magnetic pole of the sky. In front and behind that hair with 2 trunks were 2 resting spaces of the void, 2 small clearings, 2 1 leu bags filled with shade that housed only wild lilies with sharp, thin tall leaves and orange and white flowers.
He had a rectangular face, with short hair cut in a soldier’s style so he wouldn’t sweat, a big nose from which you could occasionally squeeze some strands of fat. He would crack walnuts with the palm of his hand, cut up the apples we didn’t eat in late autumn and spread them in slices on newspapers to dry so we could have them for dessert. He was scattered and delirious, and one evening by the stove, after a distant relative, whom everyone shunned, came, with the title of having lost his sight, looking at the television, he began to slur words, to become confused, to repeat „I am….so I am at home, you are….so you are”.
He was calling out our names as if he barely recognized us and was unbalanced. For a while he leaned against the walls, making us laugh sadly. How the hell could a strong man suddenly become a vegetable. This condition fluctuated and lasted for several weeks or months, more or less good days, with visits and treatment to the neurologist and with the deterioration of the general condition and tone once I isolated him from the earth, from the garden, from habits.
Little by little, he started to regain his language, his balance, but the best was when I brought him home again, to the walnuts, to the apples, only in the place where at sunrise the roosters conversed with the dogs, not understanding each other others, but fidgeting like trainee actors who haven’t learned the whole role before the performance, behind the curtain that would rise with the sunrise.
He had had a rather mild stroke, the effects of which subsided in almost a year. It was quite strange to perceive him as the same and at the same time a completely different person. In the tree of thousands of neural pathways, thousands of arteries, arterioles and cerebral capillaries of the vascular trunk, a few congealed fragments of thrombi, some hardened and stupid blood clots that were put like plugs on some cerebral vessels, had probably escaped. From that moment on, he didn’t recognize us anymore, he didn’t understand the point anymore, he couldn’t find the words anymore, we were strangers to him for a while.
Also read the article: Andrada fell asleep at sunset in the wheat field >>
The stroke
It occurs when blood flow to part of the brain is interrupted, which can lead to irreversible damage to nerve cells. Symptoms of a stroke can vary, but the most common include numbness or weakness in the face, arm or leg, especially on one side of the body, sudden confusion, difficulty speaking or understanding, vision problems in one or both eyes, difficulty walking, lack of coordination, or severe and unexpected headaches.
When these symptoms appear, it is crucial to act quickly. The first measures include calling the emergency number 112 immediately. It is essential not to let the patient sleep or wait to see if the symptoms disappear. Early identification of a stroke can allow interventions to limit brain damage.
Treatment for stroke depends on its type. Ischemic stroke, caused by a clot blocking a blood vessel in the brain, can be treated with drugs called thrombolytics, which dissolve the clot. Sometimes, it can also be done endovascularly, i.e. directly into the blood vessel, to extract the clot.
The family and patient must understand the importance of early recognition of symptoms and prompt treatment. Prevention education and symptom recognition is crucial.
In Romania, endovascular treatment centers for ischemic stroke are generally located in large cities and include institutions such as:
- The Emergency Institute for Cardiovascular Diseases and Transplantation from Târgu Mureș,
- Cluj-Napoca Emergency County Clinical Hospital and
- Bucharest University Emergency Hospital
- Timișoara Emergency County Hospital
- Bihor County Emergency Hospital
- Suceava County Emergency Hospital
- Sibiu County Emergency Hospital
- National Institute of Neurology and Neurovascular Diseases (INNBN)
- Central Military Emergency University Hospital „Dr. Carol Davila”
These centers are equipped with specific technology and qualified staff to handle such medical emergencies.
