Italy // Capalbio - How Niki came back, Part 2

June 1983, Florence - platform no. 9

"Painting calmed the chaos that shook my soul."

I love looking outside the train windows. Even if I usually have work to do.

I love trees, grass, houses...that run away. They are so fast, while I am just sitting in my train compartment. 

At that thought... I stood up all of a sudden. 

I had the urgency to move in the movement of the train. 

So I walked through the sliding doors, as if I were chasing after something.. till the handle of my bag got stuck in those unfriendly dirty doors. I pulled .. I walked on... memories came flooding back.

Never mind I didn't have much time to think.. 

That day I had to make some studies for my book .. I ended up into a waiting room of my physiotherapist and I saw her.

Here it is

That was her name. 

Niki de Saint Phalle... almost 20 years later and again that face. 

I was curious. 

I grasped the art magazine and looked for her page:

An Artist, Her Monsters, Her Two Worlds

I ripped out the article.

At home I started reading:

"LUNCH is about to be served at the country home of Niki de Saint Phalle, and there is a worm on her chair. "Yeuuch," the French-American artist says, recoiling in horror. "Do you think you could remove that?"

It is a modest worm, quite still in the summer sun. When one remembers that this is an artist who created a sensation in the early 1960's by firing a gun at her canvases in performances [...] and who has since sculptured myriad serpents and many-headed monsters, the creature appears risibly innocuous. But there is genuine alarm in Ms. Saint Phalle's cavernous blue eyes. 

"I tend to paint things I am terrified of," she says. "Worms, snakes, spiders, that kind of thing."

I fell asleep with my cup of tea still full. I never finished to read that article the day but the thought of that female figure with short-fringe hair couldn't leave me.

[end of part 2, to be continued...]