I was sitting in the courtyard of my hotel, taking in the night after walking a particularly lovely Russian girl whom I was visiting back to her own, when I met him. His name was Joseph, though his Austrian heritage softened the J. The first thing you would notice is his hair. What was once a flowing mane of jet black youth was now half as impressive, though earned through the stress of creativity on a tight schedule, revealing a shiny tan scalp that he would ponderingly rub during late nights in the studio. His eyes were wrinkled and heavy but still possessed the youth of someone who spends all day dreaming as he necessarily did. His voice was low and strong and would boom if he became excited about something or if he had drunk enough beers at the hotel bar. Less assuming but just as big, was what sat beneath the boisterous bald head. He must have been 6'6" tall, but after collapsing his large mass into a deflated slouch on the chipped bench that startled the cat sleeping underneath enough to spur a comical dash up the cracked stucco to the neighboring windowsill away from danger, you couldn't tell. He was otherwise an oaf of a man but his gentle manners and calm voice quelled that predisposition nearly instantly.
He was on an exhibition tour across Europe with 5 other artists, having just arrived from Norway after a stint in the Benelux region and would return to his home in Lint, halfway between Vienna and Salzburg, in the morning. He was traveling with his son, a divorced man--hardly surprising for someone his age, let alone a struggling artist with the accompanying distractions from his now ex wife--and he slept in a unpredictable mix of hotels and in the back of his hatchback on a worn but comfortable mattress. The kid appeared too young to have a father in his late 50's but he loved him. This was evident from his obsequious calling out from the window for his dad's return, perhaps to read him a bedtime story--the last one of his lengthy vacation.
His pieces, he explained to me through audibly exhausted English less from the long smoking habit in which he was indulging at the time, so much as the fatigue brought upon by this, the penultimate stop on his long trip, were that of wax. He would cover a painting, photograph, text, or merely a blank canvas in wax and, using a myriad of blow torches of different sizes and temperatures, melt away some of the coating in order to achieve differing levels of thickness that let altered amounts of light through and thus changed altogether the appearance of the original medium, or that created one in the latter instance. It was an old technique, one that had survived the ancient Egyptians, Pompeii, and the advent of modern art. As he described the process to me through gasped punctuation and grasped English vocabulary, I imagined the very crafting of such unique pieces as more the work of art, less so than the completed products themselves.
He kindly and not quite condescendingly assisted his explanation for me with analogies to writing after my admission to its allure, but even after hearing his initial tutorial, I knew he was on a level of skill and creativity far above that of my own. When he asked about my own writing my answer was embarrassed (though I strove to make it not sound as such) being so dwarfed by his commitment to his meticulous craft. Even still, he was very interested and listened intently to my own searched words. I told him what I wanted to do: to write short stories and once I develop the patience, novels, and he envied at the portability of my endeavor while his art must be shipped from museum to museum for each stop on his tour but in a cool enough environment so as to not melt the wax and waste hours of fastidious torching. I responded with something about how his pieces demand more skill and thus are more deserving of the care involved with their transport and he became coy from the compliment. We sat and talked for not much longer, as it was already 1 and I was becoming increasingly drawn to my new bed, a welcome change from the thin bed rolls that hostels enjoy calling "mattresses," so we wished one another guten Abend and parted ways.