Visual Arts

Zrein Imam’s “Life in Abandon” is a beautiful, evocative drawing that invites reflection and the story behind the painting was interesting indeed.

The Garden Mirror

The dust in the attic always felt older than the house itself. Elias, now in his seventies, was sorting through a life packed in cardboard boxes. His fingers dusted off the edges of things he hadn’t seen in decades. Then he found it—a framed drawing, monochrome and intricate. A wave of cool recognition washed over him. He was looking at his own youthful handiwork: Life in Abandon.

Elias carried the drawing to the window, the soft afternoon light giving depth to the charcoal shadows. It wasn’t a masterpiece, not technically, but it was a doorway.

His mind was instantly transplanted back fifty years. It was the summer after his first great love had left for Paris, and Elias, young and melodramatic, had retreated to his family’s dilapidated farmhouse in the countryside. The house was a monument to things forgotten. In the centre of the wildly overgrown walled garden stood an object out of place: a large, ornate circular mirror, leaning precariously against the crumbling brick wall.

Zrein Imam had beautifully captured that exact mirror and wall in Life in Abandon. The brick texture was the first thing Elias remembered; that rough, unyielding boundary that was supposed to keep the chaos of the world out. The mirror, too, with its gear-like, fluted frame, was rendered with great care. It was an industrial artifact, salvaged from some long-defunct textile mill, repurposed to hold a reflection.

But the mirror itself was the mystery. Elias remembered sitting before it for hours. In the drawing, the central glass is an empty void, a swirling expanse of soft shading. He hadn’t drawn a reflection because, at that time, he didn’t want to see one. The glass in the actual garden had been pitted and foggy, reflecting only an indistinct ghost of the viewer. He didn’t want to see the Elias who was lonely and abandoned; he wanted to see the world that had abandoned him.

Instead of a face, he had rendered the life that was claiming the abandonment. The drawing depicts a grapevine, tenacious and vibrant, weaving around the mirror’s rigid frame. These were the vines that had wrapped around Elias’s heart that summer. He recalled the specific shape of those heart-shaped leaves, rendered in solid, dense charcoal. They were the ‘lives in abandon’—the things that thrived only when people ceased to care. They encircled the mirror like a protective wreath, crowning it, attempting to soften its cold, gear-tooth edges.

The drawing also shows loose, individual grapes spilt beneath the mirror. Elias smiled, recalling that detail. Those were the fruits of his own neglect. He had let the harvest rot on the vine, too absorbed in his melancholy to care. In the drawing, they look scattered, heavy, and lost, a direct contrast to the upward-climbing vines.

He looked at the void in the mirror’s centre again. He saw it differently now, fifty years later. It wasn’t empty space; it was a canvas of potential. By leaving it blank, his younger self had left a space for the Elias of the future. The grapes beneath were not lost; they were seed stock. The vines surrounding the frame were not encroaching; they were embracing.

Elias traced the lines of the drawing, the textures of the brick and leaf. This simple piece, Life in Abandon, was a snapshot of a moment when he had felt totally lost, but it was also proof that the life around that loss, the life that grows when we aren’t looking, is the life that saves us. He wasn’t the abandoned boy anymore. He was the man who had, finally, stepped back through that mirror. He would re-frame it and hang it where he could see it every day, as a reminder that even in abandonment, life never truly stops.