Capture

Work from life, work from memory; capture a moment of life: movement, intensity, realism, 'driven always', wrote Suzanne Valadon, 'by a feeling for life itself.' Capture, in other words, the truth of the world: its beauty and its squalor. Capture the everyday: the ordinary movements of ordinary people; and the positions human bodies contort themselves in; and the places they frequent or inhabit. Capture the imitation of life, the imitation of art. An aspiring painter mirrors in her art that of her established patron's; a writer models himself, herself, their lived life on Woolf's Orlando. Become it! Become life, become art; and capture others becoming so.

Picture credit: Jeune Fille au Bain (Young Girl Bathing), Suzanne Valadon (source: WikiArt).

See Mistress of Montmartre: A Life of Suzanne Valadon by June Rose. 

Written March 2022.