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...]
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