Acquaranta

I started painting at forty. It sounds late, I know. But in truth, everything was already in motion — long before, under the surface, shapeless and spaceless. Like water.

At forty, you don’t begin. You arrive.

Acquaranta is not a word you’ll find in any dictionary — Italian or otherwise — and I’d love to say I invented it. But no. I borrowed it from a poetry collection by a friend of mine, Emidio Albanesi. The word came to me while I was writing this piece. In Italian it sounded right. Then I went to check whether “ranta” — after Acqua (water) — meant anything in any language in the world. In Finnish, it means shore, bank — the strip of land where water meets the earth. Acquaranta, then: the water finding its shore. At forty. For me it has a precise meaning: the moment when you stop flowing without shape and touch ground, when you stop holding back and let what you are take up space. And then you realise that what you are had begun long before.

I drew as a child, daydreaming over sketches, images, paintings. Then, in my early teens, a teacher announced to our class — girls only, as was the custom — that not one of us had any artistic talent. I stopped. As one did back then, at that age, when an adult had spoken. Well.

Shy and uncertain as I was, I always found an excuse to keep drawing. Piano lessons encouraged by my mother and my teacher — though my ear told a different story. A business diploma chosen over the secretarial course my father had mapped out for his daughter. Drawings made for my brother and cousin, busy with their science lyceum. For others. Almost in secret.

And then came life, far enough from home and yet consistent with what came before: a degree in economics, the “necessary” job moving from one company to the next, a stint in politics. Years inside structures that demanded efficiency, utility, coherence. Where everything had to be useful for something. Drawing, evidently, did not qualify. And yet my father was an extraordinary draughtsman.

Colours, brushes, the smell of linseed oil and turpentine. They became my balm. And something began to surface — passion, energy, a presence I hadn’t known I had.

People who knew me started wondering who I really was. A good question — but we’ll save that for another post.

Starting at forty means bringing everything. Everything, truly. It’s like getting married at thirty-seven — done that too.

You bring the whole first half with you, the resolved and the unresolved, what you did and what you were afraid to do, who you are and who you wish you were. Magnificent and terrible.

You bring a large, patriarchal family — the many aunts and uncles and cousins, the affection and the jealousies, the prohibitions and the refusals. A mother who was a seamstress, extraordinarily skilled, capable of holding together a job at home and an entire family in ways nobody quite understood. A father who was serious and stern, from another era, absent and formidable — but also, at times, surprisingly funny — a wholesale merchant his whole life, who made exactly two perfect portraits: mine, as a child, and his own father’s, on his deathbed.

You bring the years spent studying accountancy and economics, the many jobs that followed one another and sometimes, unexpectedly, captivated you. The search — sometimes urgent, sometimes quiet — for freedom and for love.

It’s all there. Fragment by fragment.

Water arrives. Sooner or later. Sometimes acquaranta.

P.S. It took me forty years. Grandma Moses seventy-six. All things considered, acquaranta is not that late.

→ My statement: https://www.assuntacassa.com/statement

Assunta Cassa

Contemporary painter