Jazz

A final decade, a second life. Things reduced to the simple, yet made profound; resurrected – from death – as a reductionist. Brushes, pencil and charcoal abandoned in favour of coloured paper and scissors. Cut paper like jazz music – improvisational, spontaneous; scissors like a bird in flight, knew what line to take. 'Circuses, folktales, and voyages'; Icarus, a black silhouette, burnt by the sun, with a red circle or star or dot for a heart, tumbling, as myth dictates, to his destruction. Icarus' fate but not Henri Matisse's.

Picture credit: Icarus, Henri Matisse (source: www.metmuseum.org).

From a larger work I call 'The Magician', written May 2022.

See Henri Matisse, A Second Life by Alastair Sooke.