Copyright theage
We leave the studio and head to Potts Point, the inner-city area Tomescu has lived for her entire Australian life. This is where we first met, when we lived in the same Elizabeth Bay apartment block. She cut then, as she does now, an ethereal figure, all alabaster skin and red lipstick, dressed more often than not in a long skirt, buttoned up shirt and cardigan. Her mother, Ecaterina, lived with her then, having arrived for a six-month visit in 1987 and never left. Like her daughter, she was beautiful, and like her daughter, impeccably dressed. She lived with Tomescu until her death in 2010 of a heart attack, just shy of her 83rd birthday. “She created all the circumstances for me to be a painter without knowing it,” Tomescu says. Ecaterina was inclined to bouts of melancholy when Tomescu was growing up, which she presumes was because of her father, who drank too much and womanised too much and dearly wanted to escape Communism (Ecaterina eventually left him when Tomescu was 16. He died a couple of years after Tomescu left Romania; her sister, about whom she doesn’t want to talk, is also no longer alive). Ecaterina was a pharmacist whose job took her around the country, so young Aida was regularly sent to stay with her grandmother in Constanta on the Black Sea. With no toys nor other children to play with, Tomescu was given sketching tasks by her grandmother, also a distant woman. Back in Bucharest, her mother took her occasionally to visit an uncle, who painted reproductions of works he’d bought. “I couldn’t work out why the originals were so alive, and his copies carried nothing of that,” Tomescu says. “I would discuss this with my mother on the way home.” At age 10 she started going to art school on top of regular school, and by 1977 had a diploma of art from Bucharest’s Institute of Fine Arts, where she learnt to paint using plaster casts and life models. “I will be forever grateful for the Romanian education system of that time, for being so rigorous and disciplined,” she says. “It’s still the foundation of my work.” When she came to Australia she undertook a postgraduate diploma of art while working for the Department of Immigration and later taught at the National Art School. She was painting and exhibiting at the same time and, six years in, managed to save enough to buy her first apartment. Not that it was driven by financial concerns; she knew that unlike in Europe, renting here would leave her open to being kicked out, which would disrupt her time in the studio. It was successful exhibitions in the late 1980s at Coventry Gallery in Paddington that elevated her status. Surprisingly, this left her depressed. “Everything changed around me. People thought I would change, but I didn’t.” She began questioning what it was that made people buy her work. Success, she concluded, is better for the family and friends of artists than for the artists themselves.
