Art Breeding Art

Art happens when you let the world touch you in ways you could not even imagine…now enter the room with the felt-covered walls.

In Paris, art is literally everywhere, from the architecture and museum exhibits to words sprawled across café awnings. The whole city is a conversation about the imitation of life and you enter into that language of body, color, texture, and shape with a wide listening eye.

On visiting the Hotel de Ville for L’Exposition des Impressionnistes:

The room smelled of color and years. Each painting framed and displayed according to style and theme. The people grateful for a moment of silent art-enthused catharsis…completely gratuit. They wove through the paintings and gazed at the noise of the charcoal, pencil, and paint. There’s a deep soulful language spoken by the seers and the viewed. They tell us of obscurity, humans and landscape colliding in blur and brushstroke. We whisper with our eyes, “oh, I’ve seen this somewhere - in a dream, yesterday, down the street - before.”

I was sucked into each painting – the familiar blur, the foreign stroke. The materials are common but the texture is different. I found myself wondering, “from which perspective am I viewing the balance of values?”

I viewed them from the stance of poetry and language:

On Jacques-Émile Blanche

Portrait de femme 1887

Which shapes make a woman? Which colors

Translate her timid flirtatious gaze?

The curve of her spine and

black volume of the draped cloth

The sense of exotic Hottentot hidden under her dress

The contrast of her pale skin—the rose of her

Ear—the fire-tint of the hair, the dark shift of her eye

Against a tan slated wall of nowhere

She stands, gloved hands gently resting

In her manchon—the subtle mole on her face

—the unheard of white blemish-less pearl

The profile of a woman painted by a man

On walking through Centre Pompidou

Now enter the room with the felt-covered walls

A circumvoluted jigsaw dance with life

—the cave, the canvas, the political weapon—

and long strips of sheet music colors

Now enter the room of dangling mirrors

and rattling static vibrating white noise

Sawing through the thick silence of reason

The test of intimate gesture in texture

And space, turning your focus inside out

Now enter the room of three screens of voices

Hear the language of children recreating

Picasso’s Weeping Woman:

“maybe she’s crying because she’s laughing”

Now enter the room of space and affection…