Mara Oláh started painting at the age of 43, after her mother’s death. Parallel with her autobiography, she was painting major traumas in her life, in chronological order, using art as a therapeutic tool to come to terms with, and overcome, humiliation, the grief felt over losing her mother, the anguish of alienation from her daughter, the physical pain of her cancer.

Since 1992, all her pictures have been completed with inscriptions. She made the decision when, at a 1992 exhibition in Szeged, her picture of a woman on all fours in the grass was presented as “Mara Resting,” when it, in fact, represented Mara looking for her glass eye in the grass, a real occurance. At the same exhibition, the double portrait of OMARA and her sister was put on display as “Lesbians”. Mara had to ask the curator what the word meant. Outraged by the misunderstanding, she would later paint a picture with “lesbians”. The first blue pictures appeared in 1997, because, as she puts it in her self-published autobiography: “Blue was always the colour of my daughter, blue was her best dress when she was a little girl, she wanted her room to be painted blue when she grew up, it was her favourite. The happiest day of my life was when my daughter came over to stay with me, we were making photos, and those which had my daughter on turned blue. We had no idea what happened, I’m sure it was my daughter’s beautiful blue eyes that tainted the pictures blue. In 1997 I had a dream which told me I should paint the picture I was to give to my daughter on her name day in blue. I could hardly wait to lay my hands on the paint and the boards. I had ice blue and white at home. And what did I paint? Myself with my hand on my heart, bowing deeply, thanking God for creating this in my dream. My daughter is the person I love most in the world, and this way I could make my girl’s dream come true.”
Painted in various tones of blue and complemented with textual explanations and wisdoms, the ‘blue pictures’ are confessions, about the artist’s most important, personal experiences, her relationship with her daughter, her ordeals as a Roma and a woman. The inscriptions not only verbalise the story of the narrative pictures, but also relate the time of the event, and contain reflections that show their relevance for the present and the future. A good example is Mara and the Policeman: the story of young Mara, who refused to stand with her bicycle behind the policeman in the line waiting at the railway crossing, because she had arrived earlier; despite there being several eyewitnesses, the policeman beat her almost to death.

In the picture that represents the engagement of Omara’s daughter, Mara gives voice to her indignation over the fiancé’s refusal to marry her (a gadjo, Mara thinks, who had no intention of marrying a Gypsy girl), and adds the line to the bottom: “AND IT TURNED OUT I WAS RIGHT, HE HAS LEFT MY DAUGHTER.” As if this sentence were the last mantra of a magic chant. This is needed for the lesson to be complete: the evil one is punished, the prophecy of the priestess-artist becomes reality.

When it comes to representing the interests of the Roma, Omara does not confine herself to the visual arts: she speaks out through actions and statements she makes on television, in printed and electronic journals. She visits prisons to talk to the inmates and tell them about the life of the Roma on the “outside”. Although she would probably refrain from using such words, hers is a politically conscious, activist art.

Tímea Junghaus