Oriana Fallaci (Illustrations of the day/ Ilustracije dana)

 Pencil sketch filled in with watercolours. I actually did a whole series of Oriana Fallaci's illustrations a while back, but I feel like I'm just getting started. Sometimes illustrations and sketches are just the first step leading to a more complex painting...and sometimes they're independent and exist as such. I usually don't know where will something will take me. I'm learning how to take my time with art. I'm trying not to rush the process of creating paintings. It takes a great deal of self-discipline to set time daily for something that will (realistically speaking) never bring you any financial or other gain, and it will be frustrating, tiring and draining. I don't think I have ever been fully satisfied with a painting I did. On the other hand, that is why I did so many of them. That is why I have hundreds (if not more) of sketches, illustrations and paintings in my home. That's life. You're got to keep trying even when you know you're failing. Maybe that is what doing something out of principle is.

Skica na papiru olovkom koju sam popunila vodenim bojama. Zapravo sam napravila cijelu seriju ilustracija Oriane Fallaci prije dosta vremena, ali imam osjećaj da tek započinjem. Ponekad su ilustracije i skice samo prvi korak koji vodi malo složenijoj slici...a ponekad su neovisne i postoje kao takve. Obično ne znam gdje će me nešto odvesti. Učim sebe uzimati dovoljno vremena za umjetnost. Trudim se ne požurivati proces stvaranja slika. Treba jako puno samodiscipline za odvajati svaki dan vrijeme za nešto od čega realno gledajući nikad nećeš imati materijalne ili bilo kakve koristi, a biti će frustrirajuće, umarajuće i uzimati puno energije. Mislim da nikad nisam bila posve zadovoljno s ijednom slikom koju sam naslikala. No, to je vjerojatno i razlog zašto imam na stotine skica, ilustracija i slika (ako ne i više). To je život. Moraš se truditi čak i kada znaš da ti nešto ne ide. Možda je to ono što zovu raditi nešto iz principa.

“And yet, or just for this reason, it's so fascinating to be a woman. It's an adventure that takes such courage, a challenge that's never boring. You'll have so many things to engage you if you're born a woman. To begin with, you'll have to struggle to maintain that if God exists he might even be an old woman with white hair or a beautiful girl. Then you'll have to struggle to explain that it wasn't sin that was born on the day when Eve picked an apple, what was born that day was a splendid virtue called disobedience.”

Oriana Fallaci, Letter to a Child Never Born

“To be good or bad doesn't count: life out in this world doesn't depend on that. It depends on a relation of forces based on violence. And survival is violence. You'll wear leather shoes because someone has killed a cow and skinned it to make leather.”
 Oriana Fallaci, Letter to a Child Never Born

“Lottate, ragionate col vostro cervello, ricordate che ciascuno è qualcuno, un individuo prezioso, responsabile, artefice di se stesso, difendetelo il vostro io, nocciolo di ogni libertà, la libertà è un dovere, prima che un diritto è un dove...."

“...who is the pioneer of modern journalism? Not Hemingway who wrote of his experiences in the trenches, not Orwell who spent a year of his life with the Parisian poor, not Egon Erwin Kisch the expert on Prague prostitutes, but Oriana Fallaci who in the years 1969 to 1972 published a series of interviews with the most famous politicians of the time. Those interviews were more than mere conversations; they were duels. Before the powerful politicians realized that they were fighting under unequal conditions--for she was allowed to ask questions but they were not--they were already on the floor of the ring, KO'ed.”
 Milan Kundera, Immortality

“What's the point anyway — Of suffering, dying? It teaches us to live, boy. A man who does not struggle does not live, he survives.”
Oriana Fallaci, A Man

“I've found what I was looking for, Child: what people call love between a man and a woman is a season. And if, at its flowering, this season is a feast of greenery, at its waning, it's only a heap of rotting leaves.”

...

“One day you and I will have to have a little talk about this business called love. I still don't understand what it's all about. My guess is that it's just a gigantic hoax, invented to keep people quiet and diverted. Everyone talks about love: the priests, the advertising posters, the literati, and the politicians, those of them who make love. And in speaking of love and offering it as a panacea for every tragedy, they would and betray and kill both body and soul.”
 Oriana Fallaci, Letter to a Child Never Born