Henri Matisse

Henry Miller said once about Henri Matisse "He is a bright sage, a dancing seer who, with a sweep of the brush, removes the ugly scaffold to which the body of man is chained by the incontrovertible facts of life. He it is, if any man today possesses the gift, who knows where to dissolve the human figure, who has the courage to sacrifice an harmonious line in order to detect the rhythm and murmur of the blood, who takes the light that has been refracted inside him and lets it flood the keyboard of color. Behind the minutiae, the chaos, the mockery of life, he detects the invisible pattern...."

Now Matisse tends to paint like this:



I'm not sure I catch the fractal rhythm of the world's inner order, but I've always been more of a Cezanne man. Today Eric and I went to the National Gallery which provided ample opportunity to compare them both, along with Claude Monet, who earns a special place in my heart for a series of paintings of the British House of Parliament. Impressionist, of course. But they generally look like this and I generally like them a lot:



James Cameron said about Monet once "Look at the colors!" I love it when art does art criticism. T.S. Eliot writing poetry about Chopin, who I've begun playing at night when I drink tea, which I've begun making. They classify him as a romantic. He was, but ahead of his time. Impressionist, even. Listen.