Sophie Rouméas
Painting by Konstentin Makowsky, The Muse of Poesie, 1886
I
She has piercing eyes,
deep blue and translucent.
I freeze for a moment.
She is painted upon a canvas,
a woman created and initiated
by the hand of her painter.
I was in the streets of Saint Paul de Vence,
I felt drawn into the feast of the senses,
its thousand and one inspirations,
its awakened spirit,
its mad rushing portal.
I walk into a gallery.
The artist who owns it
starts giving a speech,
he’s been waiting for someone
to deliver his philosophy.
He never stops philosophizing,
It’s in his paintings,
He breathes it.
The painting is of his wife,
she is also a painter,
and both his muse and his partner.
II
Artists are chameleons.
they blend in their subjectivity and
bewitch yours,
invoke thought,
divert it, decomplexify it,
sometimes transform it, often
transcend it.
Art is an
invitation
arising every day
at the bend of the street.
It can be born of human intention
or a natural emergence:
the curve of a tree trunk,
interspersed with ivy in the evening sun,
a cloud’s destiny in the divine light
the flight of a butterfly among the wheatgrass.
Art is a
conversation.
It opens us up to other countries,
to other melodies, to others me.
It informs me of wars, torments,
concerns of the world,
of the heart and its destinations.
III
Art is Chagall, Da Vinci, De Sainte Phalle,
it's Schubert, Beethoven, the village pianist—
all found in the streets of Saint Paul de Vence.
It is Picasso’s Dove of Peace,
Schnabel’s purple Waterfall.
Passage witness, message bearer,
art is the world that expresses itself,
even values and positions.
It’s the perfume of a woman, her blue wake in the street,
it is an exquisite chocolate dome from a great starred chef,
it’s the round of the senses,
yours, mine and what we make of them.