“Oh, I begged my mother to teach me to read. My — my poor mother was a waitress, and did ironing, and had four children.

And I begged her to teach me, and she would come home and labor and try — and do her best. And she did. She taught me to read. And so I — I just devoured every book in sight.”

~patti smith via here

Ms. Le Guennec said the box of Picassos had sat in the garage of her home for 30 years.

(from here)

Living as a sort of twin, as husband and wife or brother and sister, is a way of survival. In the case of artists these intense relations are curiously ambivalent, undefined collaborations – the two share in perceptions, temperament, in the struggle for creation, for the powers descending downward from art, for reputation, achievement, stability, for their own uniqueness – that especially. Still, only one of the twins is real as an artist, as a person with a special claim upon the world, upon the indulgence of society.

Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal.

(photo from here)

(this amazing text from the lovely s. at even cleveland who also introduced me to salt toothpaste)

“What, after all, is there great in being beautiful? To be a great woman, a great person, one must have suffered, even suffered in great crises. What have I done that I should be famous–nothing but powdered a bit gently the cheeks that God gave me and smoothed the hair that I was born with, laughed and proven a faultless set of teeth. Any grinning idol, well painted, can do as well, but the real women, the big women, are those who toil and never write of it, those who labor and never cry of it, those who forfeit all and never seek reward.”

(from an interview with lillian russell by djuana barnes)

(painting: the spanish family by alice neel)

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again,
look for me under your boot-soles”

~walt whitman

(photo: The Gypsy Camp by Marjorie Bruford)

“What I am, it is useless to say – those whom it concerns feel and find it out. To all others I wish only to be an obscure, steady-going private character.”

~Charlotte Brontë

(photo: Man Ray, L’Énigme d’Isidore Ducasse, 1920 and quote via here)

(painting: Washerwomen at Etretat by Félix Vallotton)

(second from the lovely: by land by air by sea)

“Believing it almost a sin to buy something he could make himself, Sandy would drop anything he was involved in, no matter how important, and beat out a roasting pan for Louisa or fashion a large-capacity serving ladle or a sieve. This do-it-yourself dictum was undoubtedly a carryover from their earlier, leaner days, but it had become an obsession with Sandy.”

A creative artist of any kind—writer, painter, musician—needs two conditions met in his outer life to be productive for the long haul: a physical space in which to work that he doesn’t have to think about, that is as natural for him to get to and be in as a kitchen table, and, just as important, people around him who are dedicated to smoothing his way, who will see to it that the washing is done, that visitors are handled deftly.

Calder had both of these, for nearly his entire career. His homes, in Roxbury, Connecticut and in Saché, France, had multiple workshops and each shop had multiple stations where dozens (and ultimately thousands) of works—mobiles, stabiles, gouaches, jewelry, kitchen goods—lay scattered about, with their attendant tools, waiting for their creator’s hand to turn to them again. To the outsider it looked like a sparkling chaos, but to Sandy it was like working in his own projected brain, with nearly finished thoughts readily at hand.

And for smoothing his way, Calder had Louisa.

(my father wanted to name me Louise.)

(text from here)

(photos of the calder home from here by way of a lovely desert)

(and something for the cold)

PK: So you think you were modern once but perhaps not so modern anymore?

RA: Right. And I feel like my mother used to think of herself, as an immigrant not knowing the English language and feeling isolated. I feel in a way isolated from that time, now.

(ruth asawa oral history interview)

“Later, she would remember these years, and realize with astonishment that she had, by fifteen, decided on most of the assumptions she would carry for the rest of her life: that people were essentially not evil, that perfection was death, that life was better than order and a little chaos good for the soul. Most important, this life was all. Unfortunately, she forgot these things, and had to remember them the hard way.”

— Marilyn French (The Women’s Room)

(painting by  Vilhem Hammershø reminds me of my bedroom in our old home)