Tuesday 26 November 2013

Degas Little Rat.
          She had watched them in wonder. And longed to hold them still, to calm their raging angst. She had born witness to the bewildering act of genius, which poured forth from them the first time he tried to draw her. His left hand had sought subtle contours. It had moved like a million tendrils searching her features, it had quietly raped the vagaries of her peasant face. The information it was passed through a channel of secret pathways, through his soul , to the right hand, which  waged a mighty battle across a sheet of dimpled sugarpaper.
 She watched in wonder as his thumb and forefinger adeptly cast pastel promises across the textured sheet. Earthy Roche pigments stained all his fingers. Deep crevices branched like ancient deltas from the wrinkles, which formed upon them. O how she marvelled as those elegant fingers cast colour, like a spell: a crescendo of crimson kisses, each one delicately permeating the outer ranks of a barrage of Prussian blue. How, with a savage sweetness those fingers had blended almost blindly, until they had calmed the cerulean skirmishes with earthy umber hues. And she wept at the moment when she witnessed, how Viridian valour had knelt before a Vermillion Queen. All had been daubed in a drizzle of lacy leaded white. He never saw her tears. Or heard how she had screamed inside, when she watched those same wondrous hands, driven by rage and frustration, tear at that chalk covered page, shredding it beyond all hope. Delicate plumes of pigment rose into the air with each ferocious rip. Then, she watched those wondrous hands cradle his heavy sorry head, as he sobbed from strained, hollow eyes.
She picked up a candle and lit it. She placed it at his side. She took his hand in hers. Then slowly traced her fingertip over the hills and valleys of his upturned palm. It was a complicated landscape, threaded with the tapestry of a thousand tiny crisscrossing paths. It's warmth penetrated and it's stillness soothed. It was almost hypnotic - emptying. The hopeless heap of hand, with fingers loosely curled up to cradle nothing but the darkness, seemed suddenly to twitch. She lifted the candle that she had placed on the pile of long since unread books. She let the light pass and flicker before his failing eyes and then very slightly tipped the candle so that the wax dripped and trickled in a gentle rivulet along the palm of his hand. An amber light rose between them. He stood up. He lifted his hand and with the back of it he gently brushed her pale cheek. She felt his energy surge. And once more she watched in wonder, as hands she knew so well, again sought line and contour. And pinched and pressed at a small pile of previously discarded casting wax, blindly filling out her form.

By Zoe Crosse.

Little Dancer of Fourteen Years. The information below was collected from the internet.
c. 1881 sculpture by Edgar Degas of a young student of the Paris Opera Ballet dance school named Marie van Goethem. His La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, or Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, was probably his most controversial piece, with some critics decryingwhat they thought its "appalling ugliness" while others saw in it a "blossoming."

The sculpture is two-thirds life size and was originally sculpted in wax, an unusual choice of medium for the time. It is dressed in a real bodice, tutu and ballet slippers and has a wig of real hair. All but a hair ribbon and the tutu are covered in wax. The 28 bronze repetitions that appear in museums and galleries around the world today were cast after Degas's death. The tutus worn by the bronzes vary from museum to museum.
The exact relationship between Marie van Goethem and Edgar Degas is a matter of debate. It was usual in 1880 for the "Petits Rats" of the Paris Opera to seek protectors from among the wealthy visitors at the back door of the opera.
When the La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans was shown in Paris at the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition of 1881, it received mixed reviews. The majority of critics were shocked by the piece. They compared the dancer to a monkey and an Aztec and referred to her as a "flower of precocious depravity," with a face "marked by the hateful promise of every vice" and "bearing the signs of a profoundly heinous character."[1] She looked like a medical specimen, they reported, in part because Degas exhibited the sculpture inside a glass case.
While he is known to have been working in pastel as late as the end of 1907, and is believed to have continued making sculpture as late as 1910, he apparently ceased working in 1912, when the impending demolition of his longtime residence on the rue Victor Massé forced a wrenching move to quarters on the boulevard de Clichy. He never married and spent the last years of his life restlessly wandering the streets of Paris Degas' last years were sad and lonely, especially as he outlived many of his closest friends. By the late 1880s, Degas’s eyesight had begun to fail, perhaps as a result of an injury suffered during his service in defending Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. He died in 1917.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Dancer_of_Fourteen_Years

1 comment:

  1. Halloween Treat. Thanks for the like Lynne x
    I posted it with iOS photos before so it was lost....
    Reasons to be creative. You can turn all your anger into something else.ha ha ha ....
    Short stories from the edge. Inspired by the advert of course.
    I've emptied the bin....for you," he used to say....as if it really was my rubbish...well i did buy the bin...so maybe he had managed to put two and two together and make....his first big mistake.
    After some time it became,"Why doesn't anyone ".... And here's the sting?."EVER," ouch , "empty the bin around here? " Because with his massive all seeing mind he was obviously the only person who EVER emptied it.
    So I got to thinking, and bought him his own bin. There was a bit of a kerfuffle at first. Not easy. Hard getting everything in. Tight squeeze and all that. But hey , it all went in and then the good old bin men came with their big old bin truck. Did their job...."Come for your rubbish love"...one called to me happily, almost proudly.....as I stood In my door way....as he smiled and hoisted it onto its wheels....well I wasn't going to argue about who's rubbish it was.
    It's good to have a clear out sometimes.
    The dust cart tipped it's hydraulic levers and the bin regurgitated it's bulky black bin bagged contents effortlessly into its hungry jaws.
    Perhaps I saw a splat of red, not sure.
    Funny how my bin takes four times longer to fill now.
    Halloween Treat. Thanks for the like Lynne x
    I posted it with iOS photos before so it was lost....

    Reasons to be creative. You can turn all your anger into something else.ha ha ha ....
    Short stories from the edge. Inspired by the advert of course.

    I've emptied the bin....for you," he used to say....as if it really was my rubbish...well i did buy the bin...so maybe he had managed to put two and two together and make....his first big mistake.

    After some time it became,"Why doesn't anyone ".... And here's the sting?."EVER," ouch , "empty the bin around here? " Because with his massive all seeing mind he was obviously the only person who EVER emptied it.

    So I got to thinking, and bought him his own bin. There was a bit of a kerfuffle at first. Not easy. Hard getting everything in. Tight squeeze and all that. But hey , it all went in and then the good old bin men came with their big old bin truck. Did their job...."Come for your rubbish love"...one called to me happily, almost proudly.....as I stood In my door way....as he smiled and hoisted it onto its wheels....well I wasn't going to argue about who's rubbish it was.

    It's good to have a clear out sometimes.

    The dust cart tipped it's hydraulic levers and the bin regurgitated it's bulky black bin bagged contents effortlessly into its hungry jaws.

    Perhaps I saw a splat of red, not sure.

    Funny how my bin takes four times longer to fill now.

    ReplyDelete