"Will God or someone give me the power to breathe my sigh into my canvases, the sigh of prayer and sadness, the prayer of salvation, of rebirth?"
Marc Chagall
"... an astounding universe of blue brides tumbling head over heels through the air and a pale musician floating amid a seven-armed candelabrum, a red nanny goat, and other mutable characters. There were so many different colours and objects that I was a long time taking in the marvelous disorder of the composition. That painting had music: a ticking clock, moaning violins, bleating goats, fluttering wings, and endless streams of words. It also had scents: lighted candles, wildflowers, an animal in heat, women's lotions and creams. The whole scene seemed bathed in the nebula of a happy dream; on one side the atmosphere was as warm as an afternoon siesta, and on the other you could feel the cool of a country night... that Chagall was an invitation to a game. I asked myself fascinated, how it was possible to paint like that, without an ounce of respect for the norms of composition and perspective my art teacher was trying to instill. If this artist can do whatever he pleases, so can I... I thought Chagall was a boy my own age and years later, in April 1985 when he died in the ninety-seventh year of his eternal youth, I found that in fact he had always been the boy I imagined..."Isabel Allende "Paula"
So naturally from one book to another Chagall entered my world with his paintings, autobiography and poems, all full of miracles and fairy-tales. His autobiography is a must for all those unsupported geniuses that live in us. We often wait for understanding and recognition while the most important for any artist (in the full meaning of the word) is to create, to forget yourself in whatever you do, just because it cannot be otherwise.
So, I followed him from a poor Jewish country house in Vitebsk to Paris and then back to Soviet Russia and back to Europe again. I leafed through his early years and first attempts to paint, the hardships only his light-heartedness could take him throgh, poverty, lack of understanding, his first meeting with Bella (his life-long muse), Paris studios. And every page was filled with humour and love of life as it is. And so often it seemed that it would be so much better to fly over the Eiffel Tower in an airy wedding dress under an egg-like sun of Marc Chagall.
So, I followed him from a poor Jewish country house in Vitebsk to Paris and then back to Soviet Russia and back to Europe again. I leafed through his early years and first attempts to paint, the hardships only his light-heartedness could take him throgh, poverty, lack of understanding, his first meeting with Bella (his life-long muse), Paris studios. And every page was filled with humour and love of life as it is. And so often it seemed that it would be so much better to fly over the Eiffel Tower in an airy wedding dress under an egg-like sun of Marc Chagall.
