Who is Suzanne Valadon?

published in the Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2009

this painting is on exhibit at the Pompidou Center, Paris, France

an exhibit of female artists only

for an entire year!

Anyone want to go to Paris with me?

A Quote from Mordecai Moreh

Yes, ideals need to be expressed, and mental images can be said to clamor to be created as objects. I'm never really conscious of having a message to communicate, but I've gradually learned to understand that as an artist I express things that need to be expressed. If I feel a need for self-expression, I'm not yet fully aware of what its meaning or message will be. In a way, I'm then like a pregnant woman who knows that she'll bear a child, but cannot yet say whether it will be a boy or a girl, and even less what it will grow up to be.

A Journal Entry (July, 2005)

While I was searching for the Matisse quotes I wanted to post to relate to my first posting, I came across a journal entry of mine that speaks to the experience of an artist, and this driving need for self-discovery and a record of the journey. First, I relate a "quote" attributed by Francoise Gilot in her book "My Life with Picasso" where she's no doubt paraphrased just a bit. But the essence is what I wish to share with you, so here it is, Picasso speaking:

"I paint the way some people write their autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages of my journal, and as such they are valid. The future will choose which pages it prefers, it's not up to me to make the choice. I have the impression that time is speeding on past me more and more rapidly. I'm like a river that rolls on, dragging with it the tress that grow too close to its banks or dead calves one might have thrown into it or any kind of microbes that develop in it. I carry all that along with me and go on. It's the movement of painting that interests me, the dramatic movement from one effort to the next, even if those efforts are not pushed to their ultimate end. In some of my paintings I can say with certainty that the effort has been brought to its full weight and its conclusion, because here I have been able to stop the flow of life around me. I have less and less time, and yet I have more and more to say, and what I have to say is, increasingly, something about what goes on in the movement of my thought. I've reached the moment you see, when the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself." (pp. 123,4)

Now from the pages of my own journal(2005, edited): "Reading the deKooning biography and living it!

I'm not an immigrant, like deKooning was, arrived here from a distant land, a stowaway. But I might as well have been, in the same way I feel about my isolation. deKooning's biographers are careful to sound balanced on their subject, but still belie (everywhere in the book) their lack of sympathy, their prejudices against his anti-social behavior and, the flip side, their romanticized idealizations of "the artist".

I've not enjoyed telling the "real stories" of my life much, they always got too much reaction for me to feel comfortable telling...I didn't want people to know those things about my past that made me --well, the kindest word is always "different", but all other connotations apply. Odd, exotic, histrionic, depending on the proclivities and prejudices of the person acting as my judge and jury. But for some reason tonight I glance first toward a hovering full moon and then to a publication on my desk that calls itself "Reveal" and hear it as my directive, like a madwoman!

But I don't think I'm mad, I've got too high a functional life for madness, I do know I've had an extraordinary life (get that? - extra / ordinary!) an unusual one at least, and that somewhere beneath the detritus of it, there is meaning-- meaning we all search for in living our lives, but even stranger, some kind of higher purpose to it all.

"Words or pictures?; I've got so much I want to say but I don't want to be quoted! Or it is the tyranny of words being too fixed; because experience is not fixable; your experience, your perceptions are always changing over time. If I contemplate writing about my life, I worry about this: I might feel differently about it later, even minutes later! I cannot fix an attitude and even fear such a condition. I've been locked into too many boxes already!

I've only got images, fresh in my mind, that I can convey, like the pages in a journal.

(another entry, 2006)

"Trapped within the confines of...

the frame

the size of the canvas

the width of the lens, the aperture

the domain of self

the two halves of my self (twins only in name)

the destroyer self and the explorer self,

the finite self and infinite self,

the Mother self, the progenitor self

the prodigal self (the obsolete self)

the displaced self (or misplaced)--

the original self, the aboriginal self-- the journey back to

the Origin Self- the One-and-the Other combined in wholeness

the recombinant DNA of self-- and the journey forward.

the grape must be crushed to make the wine!

Most of my work communicates a sort of "joie de vivre" that I possess as a person. I love life, I love color, shapes, the human form--all of nature compels me to paint, to celebrate what I feel when I look at the world I live in. Only occasionally do my paintings express a dark view, because I enjoy what I see in spite of the ever present darkness around us, the suffering and the hatred that exists in our world. Like Matisse, I am needing to communicate something positive, to bring joy to others, to lighten other's burdens--yes, even to bring pleasure to the foreground! I want my paintings to be pleasurable to experience, otherwise they fail an intention basic to my nature.