VERTICAL INVADERS: We are all in Exile.

JEAN COCTEAU.

In 1973....... I was in High School loving my time in the Art Room.

My teacher whom I remember with great admiration.....was a man called Max Grierson.
He was so very enthusiastic towards telling stories about Monsieur Picasso.

On Sunday the 8th of April 1973....Pablo Picasso died.
He was buried in the remote seclusion of the CHATEAU DE VAUVENARGUES with the greatest possible privacy.
A heavy fall of snow covered the flowers already abundant in the Provencal spring and a violent thunderstorm announced his arrival.

My teacher went on to say...in nature beauty and ugliness are inextricably partners and Picasso's art expresses this throughout his love of nature as a whole.
He is a scavenger who unearths from the mud abandoned riches and the magician who creates VENUS out of empty space.
He was born with a philosopher's stone in his hand.

Exile is a state in which, in it's subjective effects, never stands still.

To be an artist is to live in exile perpetually....we are outsiders with irrational tendencies for all matters of strange and enlightening elements of thought....the processes are deeply philosophical and without the homages......and the many who shook up the centuries past...we would not be well guided in our plights.

Morandi.....Rothko.....Pollock....Modigliani.....held their own...Morandi painted pots and jugs for 40 years....Rothko and his paintings of self cremation.....Pollock in Long Island was visited by Celestial Aliens from above.....and gave us the galaxy of constellations .......and my most treasured of all bohemian's, Amedeo Modigliani ....could only see his long and seductive women.....all alluring and ready to conquer and bewitch.

As a teacher I often use a text to explain our uncompromising judgements in art....and hold many discussions regarding this text....JOHN BERGER'S....WAYS OF SEEING.

He is so easy for the students to read.....I enjoy his descriptions and knowledge in an area so often overlooked.

Exile.....loneliness.

YVES SAINT LAURENT.

To the artist...... being lonely in the same way a lunatic is lonely is because it seems to the lunatic that, since he never meets opposition, he can do anything. It is by paradox...the loneliness of self-sufficiency.

I almost forgot to tell you...GEORGES BESSON wrote of the homages of Picasso..

This man, whose tastes are not extravagant, has a weakness for black diamonds.
He owns two superb ones.
He will never part with them.
They weigh a good hundred carats each.
He wears them where others have eyes, it's as I tell you...and I assure you that those women on whom these diamonds turn their fire are utterly bowled over.