STATE of Mind - issue 7

We're endlessly fascinated by the physical presence of people who make things that are, to use Plato's words,"good, true, and beautiful."  Perhaps we feel the place beauty emerges from, the artist's interior world, is more interesting than the world into which it emerges. And many times, the artist's inner world manifests in another way – when she treats her body as a canvas, a plaything to be made up. Sometimes a shirt, dress, or even a pair of boots can seem like so much more, enlivened in some way and acting as its own marker of meaning.

1. Frida Kahlo (1907-1954): "Take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are a bourbon biscuit."

2. Virginia and Leonard Woolf (1882-1941): “How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.” 

3. Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986): 

“One day a hummingbird flew in--
It fluttered against the window til I got it down where I could reach it with an open umbrella--
--When I had it in my hand it was so small I couldn't believe I had it--but I could feel the intense life--so intense and so tiny--
...You were like the humming bird to me...
And I am rather inclined to feel that you and I know the best part of one another without spending much time together--
--It is not that I fear the knowing--
It is that I am at this moment willing to let you be what you are to me--it is beautiful and pure and very intensely alive.” 

4. Patti Smith (1946-present): “In time we often become one with those we once failed to understand.” 

While we'll never know the internal lives of the people we admire and wonder about, we do have artistic signposts – the images they made, words they wrote, songs they sang, photographs; sometimes even the clothes they left behind.