The air was mixing paints, touching the easel with a paintbrush long before the eyes and hands started working. Impressionists, everywhere only impressionists. France went mad, artists were flying to Paris like butterflies to the light. In that immoral highly spiritual city painting and obsession were queening, and any mediators between an eye and a feeling. Stormy enthusiastic continuation of the deceived realism, of the meticulous and modest poetics. No to quiet paints! – birds on the glider were shouting. Everything disturbed, overbalanced and came back to a cheap cafe, to brothels and unsettled homes. Left unattended life with turned up pockets attracted everybody without any distinction. Money was devaluing. It was wanted to go begging and tramping with a beret on the head and an easel in the hand.
Restless masterful dream is tearing the mask and stripping the essence of phenomena not affranchising You. Your choice is still ahead: from the material – to the freedom of spirit, to the mastership crowned by poverty in the plenitude of Your power and passionate paints. What a greedy fate! It decided everything for You long ago and asked You to play a cat and mouse game, You dropped everything and pludged into that pool with a wild despair of a madman. An amateur, You was named so by artists from the “gang” of honorable Manet, and You would have been carrying the stigma of shame so long. Not they, but You considered so. Pride is Your second I.
And the time passed, You neglected everything: deals, family and home, no return. Naive, You thought that painting would save. But an artist has another fate. Confusion, despair and glimmers of a blessed passion – impression is called so by those who are named poets. A poet, what is it – a symbol, a sign, an omen? But not really, it is such a pain, it lives in soul, in heaven, it’s called a high spirit.
A dream, desired and unrealizable, it had been always close to You. It came to You at night in the person of dismissed forebodings. It was so in childhood in Lim, and thirty-five years later, in Arles, a shelter of demented Van Gogh, a forerunner of Your indomitable disasters. But You didn’t hear anything. Pissaro was an exception, but not for long, as soon as the apprenticeship time was over, You at once ridiculed his efforts and works.
Such a coincidence of gifts, and will, and wild closed anguish for unexplored places. From Granny on the maternal side You got a passionate blood and desire for changes. You tried a lot: you went to the heartless seas, saw the space of the oceans, served on the exchange – everything not yours.
In Paris, in Tahiti – everywhere You felt yourself as a stranger. You thought to run away from people, from circumstances, but really ran away from yourself. How possible to live without kindness and friends? But You had lived. Creative temperament and poetic imagination served as a substitute. Delacroix, a wise man, a philosopher, a colorist, entered into life as a hero.
An artist is a negation of human mission on the Earth. Then why did the Creator give him such a power? As a trial, as a punishment for previous sins, or probably as an excuse, as a confirmation of the Creative essence of being actions. God takes an artist as a hand assistant, but sometimes an artist forgets about it and thinks that everything is in his hands.
Not You – Your genius whispered in Your ear that there was no better nature than memory, and You painted not with a despair of Tahitian women, but with Your own despair. You paid for your sins, and every your picture speaks as a drop of blood, and sprouts into life as a green tree of hope that touches the heaven with its crown. It covers You from heat and gifts Your resigned soul with coolness and peace, people’s loyalty and memory.