Notes from an archive of affection · Fragments on the teacher Ion Șinca

Apart from a very few close friends, not one of Mr. Ion Șinca's pupils knew him entirely. The teacher's presence in the school studio was of a resonant discretion. Far from any opaque muteness, our teacher — from the very moment I met him — gave a definition to measure.

Though we did not know him, he was still familiar to us; and it is no overstatement to say that each of his pupils holds a solar yet subjective archive of his image. Each of us came to know him personally, in sequence, in episodes, in fragments. In this sense no objective portrait of the teacher can be summoned, for what is objectivity but a certain sum of subjectivities brought into accord.

For many of us, the teacher of the Painting section surprised us by never resorting to all-too-predictable clichés. Never did I hear him use inflamed terms such as “master”, “apprentices”, “school of painting”, “mystery”, “inspiration” and the like. The “clichés” of the practice of painting found their place in the school studio without being named, the teacher managing to find a fitting place for them in the mind of each of us.

Our teacher's pedagogy was an attentive one, being at once academically close and distant. But one precise look at his painting evokes the familiar unknown man, the serene, sober and well-measured schoolmaster. The Ploiești high-school studio, occupied each week with an adolescent's enthusiasm, has kept a permanent place in my archive of affection — a studio bound, without any doubt, to the evoked figure of our form master.

I offer solar thanks to Mrs. Diana Dragomir and Mrs. Stela Șinca, the daughter and the wife of the one remembered, for this inspired exercise of remembrance, which would not have taken place without their invitation.