Tag: chagall

Posted on

Day 04

Day 04 – A picture of your night.

Oh. It said night, not knight.

Well, so there’s my night. Once again, a highly interpretive little thing, “a picture of your night.” I tend to like to sleep at night. Thus, a picture of the inside of my eyelids. But you know, part of sleeping is dreaming, so I thought I’d share something else. I dream in color. Not always, but when I do it’s pretty cool. And it looks like the ceiling of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. Without the goats.

I really love the colors that Chagall uses, only, the floating goats are a little too much. In all fairness, though, this is actually my favorite Chagall painting:

It’s called Self-Portrait with Muse and I fell in love with it when I first saw it almost 30 years ago. In fact, I had been rather tepid about the Chagall museum until I saw this painting up close and contemplated the origins of inspiration. I explain it a little here, and am reminded of another painting, too. Many years later I  would go full circle and encounter a very different painting, this one by Rembrandt, St. Matthew and the Angel, and I suppose, with my refined (read that older and mature) sensibilities, found it moving, more so than when I first saw the Chagall. I was drawn to this Rembrandt painting at a traveling Louvre exhibit in Atlanta, and circled back to it several times, drawn to the Angel.

Years passed between the time I saw the Rembrandt painting and I thought about writing again. Something remarkable happened and I started making a connection between my own writing and the Divine source of that inspiration. It wasn’t a cascade or domino effect, but a gradual awakening, guided a little by a mortal muse, but a muse nonetheless.

By the way, the real picture of my night, in case you missed it, is a little trip into my head…

 

Posted on

today is Marc Chagall’s birthday

I know this because Google has its usual tribute to the day’s event in its header. It’s important to me because Chagall is actually one of those artists that I happen to adore. I want to be very careful here and not sound pretentious or goofy or like a poser. I’m not a connoisseur of anything, but I know what I like, and I tend to really like the things I claim to like.

I first encountered Chagall quite by accident. I was living in Aix-en-Provence, a beautiful city in southern France not too far from Marseille and the Riviera. I was attending school there and enjoying the wonderful host family that coincidentally had many of the same interests as I. The whole flat was covered in books, and as an English major minoring in French (who knew I needed French to study the medieval literature I loved?) I was in absolute heaven.  More about these wonderful folks another time.

Anyway, I ended up at the Chagall Museum in Nice and couldn’t tear myself away. His work, to me, seems whimsical but very symbolic, and I couldn’t read enough about his life. I think I was drawn to his work because of his use of color, particularly blue, and absolutely fell in love with this painting:

I couldn’t put my finger on the significance that this painting would have on me later, but at the time I was drawn by the color and the contrasts he created. It turns out blue is a very meaningful color–suggestive of the Divine. Hmm. Who knew? Certainly not I. I was just mesmerized by the art on display.

It reminded me a little bit of another painting that I love, The Old Guitarist by Picasso:

This painting is unique because if you look above the old man’s head, a woman’s face emerges–like Picasso may have painted over something else, or, perhaps, his muse is faintly visible.

Anyway, that’s my tribute to Chagall. I’ll forgive him for the atrocity that is the ceiling at the Paris Opera.

Pin It on Pinterest