From Chicago....with love 2

My dropbox was overflowing with wonderful picts of paintings, among them I was thrilled to discover another Cézanne about 'les baigneuses' from a site we know so well, the River Arc by the side of Aix en Provence.


One summer evening as we were walking along its banks we saw a group of gypsy women and chidren having fun and bathing, cooling down in the water and the shade of the trees as the heat had been almost unbearable during the day, and we both had the impression of 'dejà vu', thinking of Cézanne's painting, he must have come across such a scene one summer evening, and decided to paint it. Who knows? The river Arc must keep its secrets and Cézanne was a familiar visitor of its banks, like us, after all.
But what strikes my imagination is the treetrunk.
Charles Ray's fascination for it, when he discovered it embedded in a field, transformed this object of nature in a work of art.
The real treetrunk has been moved, then cast in moulds, and from the moulds, it has been carved in Japanese cypress in Japan by Master of woodwork Yuboka Mukoyoshi. The fallen treetrunk was something like 400 years old, and this work of art will also last 400 years before starting to decay. The hollow bark inspired the artist, who linked its meaning to the air, the vital concept of breathing. For me it is also linked to music: the hollow ancestral bark can allow the air to vibrate through the woodbark. It might sing with the tempest and breathe with strong winds. Then it is another form of life, even as a fallen treetrunk.It can breathe through and whisper.
Giacometti's slim elongated figures match perfectly the architecture.

No more pictures because the International Conference on Speech prosody has started and Dan is ever so busy!
I am most grateful for my dropbox presents from the Art Institute of Chicago. (On Monday)