eleven stories...

i'm enthusiastic. it's one of my better qualities.

and i'm not bragging. i mean, some of us were born with lustrous hair or covetable teeth or an ease with numbers or one perfect smattering of freckles on our bum. along with said smattering, i was also born with ardor.

{i don't know why i just spilled such private information. please erase from your minds that whole enthusiasm thing. very sorry. and wow. can you tell i've been sick and sleepless all weekend? very very sorry. truly.}

so i'm never really shocked by my visceral responses to artists or essays or even mittens, for that matter. i tend to gasp easily.

but for the first time in my life, i think, i saw the work of nicolas de staël. it floored me. i experienced an instantly physical reaction to the few paintings i saw, which is nothing new. not really. i told you i was enthusiastic. no...this went beyond i love it! whether it was his fat impasto or how i felt like i could see each and every stroke he made or just my affinity for landscapes. i don't know. but, man...he moved me.

which always makes me smile. because i think, at this point in my life, i've seen it. i've done it. i've been moved. i've got it mastered. and when i'm reminded out of the clear blue that i've not remotely seen it or done it or been moved or mastered at all?

well. that thrills me.

he also breaks my heart a bit. a lot, in fact. jumped to his death from an eleventh floor when he was just forty-one years old. that guts me more than i could ever explain, so i won't even try.

but i will post a few of his paintings. and i will show them to my girlies three at some point today or tomorrow or a few dozen times in their lifetimes. and grae will say something like i can paint like that! and lill will roll her eyes and esmé will not understand.

and then i'll tell them that he fell from a sadness too high in antibes, and grae will fall silent and lill's eyes will fill and esmé will not understand until she does. but then they'll look more closely at his work. and they'll carry him around in their hearts for as long as little girls can...maybe fifteen minutes. maybe less. hopefully longer. and grae will proclaim him to be her new van gogh. lill will, too. and esmé just won't understand. until she does.

someone who ended so tragically and so alone should have nice things said about them after they've left, don't you think? they must not have heard it enough when they were here.

sad when it's a strange artist found on another girl's blog who you couldn't have caught even if you'd been on the ground in antibes that day, looking up at the eleventh. sadder still if it's someone you could've grabbed before they even stepped out onto the balcony.

i'm going to try to be kind all week. that sounds dumb, doesn't it? oh...be kind.

first of all. i am completely taken with liberty london girl. she's seriously influential while entirely anonymous, which intrigues me to no end. but. and i believe this is my second of all. i found her via india knight's posterus, which is so overflowing with genius that i find i need a bigger monitor. it was a good weekend to be a sick girl plus an insomniac. thank you, ladies.