Summary for: THE PICTURE: A WORK OF THEORY AND FICTION BY YVONNE M. IGNACIO

 In the last thickets of Santa Clarita, lives Ava, a reticent beauty who is experiencing a seasonal change. This unaffected dreamer is lush like a Zen garden whose management emphasizes foliage, but restricts the propagation of flowers. She lives tranquilly with this emotional austerity, edged by good men whose affection she cannot return.

Then one day on a film set, she meets Johannes, a cinematographer from Hamburg whose handsomeness and appeal is like the water flowing over rugged stones. By one look, this exotic outlander arises out of Ava the spring-flush of wine-grapes and the wilder spirit of the tropics.

But Johannes's habitual Germanic industriousness and periodical reserve thwart her. She sees so little of him, and there is so much variegation in his actions, that she does not know if she is in love with the wash of romance, or the large or implied views of his presence.

So after each of his disappearances, Ava searches to find the symbolic spaces around Johannes, and is led to techno clubs, raves, art fairs, independent films, festivals, and open-air concerts in Los Angeles. In these city-places, she catches his dappled qualities in the men she meets who want her instinctively.

But they do not satisfy Ava. Nothing does. Even career advancement and the stable relationships that have always nurtured her offer no succor towards this specialized need. Soon Avas suffering becomes endemic, affecting those who pine for her into an untamed floriculture of immutable devotion.

She then tries to kill Johanness spirit by engaging his hereditary antagonist in a turbulent coupling. When that fails, she escapes thoughts of him and the imprints of his work by returning to her traditional niches, the Philippines and Hawaii. Still there, where his media images cannot touch, he is as ubiquitously real as monumental rock.

Consequently, Ava begins this study of her peripatetic man, a survey as random as petals strewn upon a trail. She follows the mystery of Johanness turning path to where it leads to higher and higher arbors of passionate discovery. As she climbs each terrace in her heart, she looks back and beyond, following the lantern light and handrails of reason and philosophy.

THE PICTURE: A WORK OF THEORY AND FICTION mingles portraiture and love with the flooded streambed of war and conquest. It confers fresh importance on the landscape of male beauty and the fragrance of time. Tucked into the trunk of its pastoral lyricism are the face-reflecting basins of childhood and art, and the symbiosis of illusion and faith. This is a plaintive story, filtered by leafy Eros and the winter bareness of certain sciences.

In the end, Ava realizes the desirability of love, is in its fleeting yet rejuvenescent quality, and the deep, sympathetic spirituality it cultivates in her soul. She is a flower that lives and dies for love. Her circumstance is a cyclical resolution of life.