My mother used to paint, but she hasn’t picked up a brush in over 30 years [because of a dark plot twist]. And she was good. When I was off living my own life in my early 20s, she was getting ready to move. She’d already shipped her paintings across an ocean, but then she didn’t end up moving [because of another dark plot twist], and she didn’t bother to get them back. They’re gone forever. My brother and I are eternally bummed about that.

Anyway, she was working towards a Fine Arts degree when I was a kid, on and off, and I know a tiny (tiny) bit about art because I used to read her textbooks for fun, and she’d give me little art history lessons every now and then. Of course, in my first semester of college, I took the requisite Survey of Art History, which was essentially a three-month slideshow in an amphitheater, but that was two million years ago, so it’s pretty much gone.

When I met Vincent, who owns (and actually reads) books with titles like Art and Politics in the Weimar Period, suddenly the fact that I could (usually) tell a Monet from a Manet seemed rather severely lame. But fortunately I live in France now, where art oozes out from between the cracks in the cobblestones and creeps like fungus up the walls. It gets under your skin and you eventually start to respond to art, even if your artistic sensibilities were grossly underdeveloped to begin with. At least that’s what’s happening to me. Living with an artist helps, of course. I now get art history lessons from him. Got one last night, in fact, on Dada.

French TV spews art too. They even talk about the arts on the evening news, at the end, where in the States we get baseball… There’s a fabulous show we often watch called Metropolis on Arte, a French-German arts channel. On Metropolis a couple of weeks ago, I discovered my new favorite artist, a previously underrated (apparently) Russian avant-garde (apparently) painter (and costume designer, set designer, illustrator, and writer) named Natalia Goncharova (also Gontscharowa).

Vincent thinks the fact that humans can make art is the only thing that makes them worth the space they take up. I say our only redeeming quality is our capacity for loving. This minor difference of opinion does not cause a lot of conflict in our relationship.

Here’s some Natalia for your viewing pleasure:

Self-portrait, 1907

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The Cyclist, 1913

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Composition with trees, 1920s

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Ballet program, or poster?

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