Drawing Life 20
When I was looking at everyone’s work in the drawing class on Saturday I had to think of the great synergy that happens when artists get together to make art and to share their inspirations and journeys. We all did work we wouldn’t have done otherwise because we had the chance to be inspired by each other and to get a boost from the energy in the class.
One of the students, Maureen, is going to Paris next month and lent me the video, Paris Was Yesterday. It’s the story of a group of gay women, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Janet Flanner, Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier and others who were catalysts for emerging modernism in the early part of the 2oth century. Stein bought Picasso paintings before anyone else would touch them. Sylvia Beach published James Joyce when he was hounded out of England for his use of obscenity in his writing. (Dear A, Literature Professor and man of taste and insight par excellence, thinks Joyce is not all he was cracked up to be. You only want to read Ulysses once, if at all, for sure. But Joyce did show us, as all the early modernists did, that we can play and break the mold in any way we want. A big thank you to them.)
Change came from this synergy of creative people gathering together not just from those who burst out of the pack like Picasso and Matisse. They were perhaps the most dogged and devoted and gifted of practitioners but their wider group nourished them.
I pulled out a book I’ve had for ages, Kiki’s Paris / Artists and Lovers 1910-1920. Kiki was a model for many of the artists in Paris at that time and there are hundreds of photos in the book. Here is a drawing of Matisse teaching at his Academy and a photo of some of the ladies in his class at a cafe afterward.
Can we bring back cafe society, please? And hats? That’s Kiki above in the fabulous hat. All of this one hundred years ago but it looks like more fun than we’re having now. We haven’t had great fun clothes or a sense of cultural joie de vivre since the sixties. It’s time, n’est-ce pas? (And we won’t get political here but there are correspondences.) Well, change is coming and I suspect it’s going to be grand and amazing. Keep praying.
Well, here’s to the continuation of creative endeavor and to all who practice art in whatever form and all who support it. It’s about changing consciousness in a positive way. Who knows our part in the creation of peace and joy on the planet? But it’s possible. Oh, yes.
March 14th, 2007 at 10:12 am
There is nothing better than a new hat to brighten the spirits and ward off bad hair days. The girls in the photo look as if they’re having fun and I love it that Henri always wears his wooly suit and tie for a day’s painting. I think cars are responsible for the demise of cafe society. Real communities are thin on the ground these days.
Bless you and all creatives,
KT
March 14th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Cars are a true problem. I think we should all be riding around in small silent golf carts or hopping onto electric buses. Meanwhile, well spotted re: Henri. Must take care to dress for work. It certainly worked for him.