Illustration by Igor Morski, Artwork Green Act 1
Once the trees
Were people like us
But stronger
Happier
More in love, perhaps
Wiser
That’s all they were
Jacques Prévert – Trees –
Painting by Léna Sotskova
Sensitivity cannot be acquired, it is a richness that only the authentic soul possesses.
A. Schlaumich
Tetiana Erkhart
All she was looking for was a more or less suitable place to live, by which I mean: a little place where she could sing and sometimes cry in peace. In truth, she didn’t want a house; Ombre wanted a garden.
Alejandra Pizarnik “Texts by Ombre”.
Hjalmar Munsterhjelm (Sweden-Finland) “Moonlit Night” 1883
Your soul is a chosen landscape
Where charming masks and bergamasques go,
Playing the lute and dancing and almost
Sad under their whimsical disguises.
While singing in the minor mode
Of victorious love and opportune life,
They don’t seem to believe in their happiness
And their song mingles with the moonlight,
The calm moonlight, sad and beautiful,
That makes the birds dream in the trees
And the fountains sob with ecstasy,
The great slender fountains among the marbles.
Paul Verlaine, Clair de lune Fêtes Galantes
Maryam Lamei Harvani (Iran).
“A tale of the power of love
Between all my torments between death and me
Between my despair and the reason for living
There is injustice and the misfortune of mankind
That I cannot admit there is my anger
There’s the blood-coloured maquis of Spain
There’s the maquis of Greece, the colour of the sky
Bread, blood, sky and the right to hope
For all the innocents who hate evil
The light is always close to going out
Life always prepares to become manure
But spring is reborn and it’s not over yet
A bud emerges from the darkness and warmth sets in
And the heat will get the better of the selfish
Their atrophied senses can’t withstand it
I hear the fire talking, laughing at the tepidness
I hear a man say that he has not suffered
You who were the sensitive conscience of my flesh
You whom I love forever, you who invented me
You couldn’t stand oppression or insult
You sang and dreamt of happiness on earth
You dreamed of being free and I continue you.
Paul Eluard
Andrei Riabovitchev , contemporary Russian painter
Beauty
I am beautiful, O mortals, like a dream of stone,
And my bosom, where each has bruised in turn,
Is made to inspire the poet with a love
Eternal and mute as matter.
I throne in the azure like a misunderstood sphinx;
I unite a heart of snow to the whiteness of swans;
I hate the movement that moves the lines,
And I never cry and I never laugh.
The poets, in front of my great attitudes,
Which I seem to borrow from the proudest monuments,
Will spend their days in austere study;
For I have to fascinate these docile lovers,
Pure mirrors that make all things more beautiful:
My eyes, my wide eyes with eternal clarity!
Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil
Ken Hamilton (contemporary Irish painter, neo-Renaissance style).
“The perfume of the soul is memory.
It is the most delicate, sweetest part of the heart, which detaches itself to embrace another heart and follow it everywhere.
The affection of a loved one who is no longer with us is no more than a perfume; but how sweet and how sweet it is, how it brings to a spirit that is downcast and ill, images of goodness and cherished hopes!
Fear not, O you who have left this fragrant trail on my path, never fear that I will let it be lost.
I will hold it tightly in my silent heart, like a subtle essence in a sealed bottle.
No one will breathe it but me, and I will bring it to my lips in my days of distress, to draw consolation and strength from it, the dreams of the past, the oblivion of the present.
George Sand ~ Letters from a traveller ~
Zhong Yang Huang, contemporary Chinese painter
“In your tender eyes and warm body
From these shores
I have in my skin
Your sweet face
Emerging from the blur of oblivion
To shine in my soul and in my nights
For your face
That sweet face
Is the face
Of my life….” extract, lyrics by Charles Aznavour
Painting by Shinya Okayama
The innocence of childhood is the ability to believe that nothing is impossible, to believe in magic without reason.
Pierre Szalowski
Jacky Gerritsen “Blues”.
“The quieter you become
the more you are able to hear”.
Lao Tseu.
Painting by Valeria Corvino, MAGMA VII, “Mi ami davvero? So che dirai di sì e ti crederò”.
My love, for figuring my desires
Put your lips to the sky with your words like a star
Your kisses in the living night
And the trail of your arms around me
Like a flame of conquest
My dreams are in the world
Clear and perpetual. And when you’re not there
I dream that I sleep I dream that I dream.
Paul Éluard
Tammy L GROSS.
“Only through ardent patience can we conquer the splendid city that will give light, justice and dignity to all men. Then poetry will not have sung in vain.
Pablo NERUDA
(Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech in 1971, in which he takes up and develops a phrase from Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell”: “And at dawn, armed with ardent patience, we shall enter the splendid cities”).
Aykut Aydogdu ~ digital art ~
(Turkish artist born in Istanbul in 1986).
If you can’t think, walk;
If you think too much, walk;
If you think badly, walk some more.
Jean Giono
Painting by Paul Delvaux
“Every woman contains a secret,
an accent, a gesture, a silence…”
Antoine de Saint Exupéry, (Courrier Sud – 1929)
Painting by Céline Ranger
“Just as the value of life is not in its surface but in its depths, things seen are not in their bark but in their core, and men are not in their faces but in their hearts.”
Khalil Gibran
The Life of Kenji Yoshida
My real desire wasn’t to write, it was to be silent. To sit on a doorstep and watch what comes, without adding to the great rustle of the world. This desire is an autistic desire. There is only one letter’s difference between the word ‘autistic’ and the word ‘artist’.
Christian Bobin – Exhaustion
Painting by Aiko Sakamoto.
“I pay homage to those who speak to the wind, to those madly in love, to visionaries, to those who would give life to a dream. To the rejected, the excluded. To the men of the heart, to those who persist in believing in pure feelings. To those who are ridiculed and judged. To those who are not afraid to say what they think and who never give up.”
Miguel de Cervantes
Photo Tears of the lake by Natalia Drepina.
“I burst into tears. I have a weakness for that expression. You never burst from hunger or cold. On the other hand, you burst out laughing or crying. There are feelings that justify bursting into tears.
Albert Espinosa
Old Time Japan, by Shiori Matsuura.
“There are those who travel to lose themselves.
There are those who travel to find themselves. “
Gustave Flaubert
Pier Luigi Esclapon de Villeneuve. photographer
Emotions have no taste for the established order.
Yukio Mishima (Confessions of a Mask)
Sculpture by Mickael Akfano
Tonight my heart makes sing
Angels who remember…
A voice, almost mine,
Tempted by too much silence,
Rises and decides
Not to return;
Tender and intrepid,
To what will it unite?
Rainer Maria Rilke
Illustration by François Fressinier
When I look up at you, it’s like the world is shaking.
Antonin Artaud
“Les Timides” by Belgian sculptor Cris Pereby
The shy and the awkward, who often don’t know what to say and what not to say, and who get their brushes tangled looking for their words, staring at their fingertips, have a beautiful soul and a warm heart.
V. H. Scorp
Plant sculpture: Anna & the Willow
Writing makes you wild. It takes us back to a savagery that predates life. And you always recognise it: it’s the wildness of the forest, as old as time itself. The fear of everything, distinct and inseparable from life itself.
Marguerite Duras
Illustration by Canadian painter Martin Beaupré
It’s time for you
To let go
Fear and doubt
To move on.
François Cheng
Illustration by Picasso
I have finished laughing and dying
One with the other, dove cruelly…
What a night this splendid day carries,
People are birds of a feather!
The world is the way
To love.
Like dying
We must live again,
Even in the darkest days,
Beyond tears and blood…
To live, neighbours in one land.
We must love
As never before
And that day will be my home,
Like a child found;
Among abandoned ruins;
Marchons pour la paix.
Louis Aragon
“JOY” 2020 by Tawny Chatmon (American photographer born in 1979, famous for her portraits of black children covered in gold leaf and paint).
If only we knew how to love each other as much as get angry, how to beautify as much as ugly, how to give and take pleasure as much as give and take blows.
Zeruya Shalev, “Douleur” (Pain)
Sculpture by Anton SMIT
“That a reality may be hidden behind an appearance is, after all, possible; that language may be able to convey it, it would be ridiculous to hope. So why bother with one opinion rather than another, why shrink from the banal or the inconceivable, from the duty to say and write anything? A minimum of wisdom would oblige us to support all the theses at the same time, in an eclecticism of smiles and destruction.”
Emil Michel Cioran, Syllogisms of Bitterness
Illustration by Shamsia Hassani – 2020
I’M WAITING …
i’m waiting for the rain
says the desert
i am waiting for peace
says the soldier
I am waiting for tomorrow
says today
I am waiting for the night
says the firefly
me too says the astronomer
me too says the star
I’m waiting for the wind
says the dandelion flower
so says the bird
I am waiting for my time
says the prisoner
me too says freedom
I am waiting for peace
says the soldier
you already said it
I know says the soldier
I’m expecting a child
said the mother
I’m waiting for everything
said the child.
Hubert Mingarelli, Le secret du Funambule ” Zanzibar “, Éditions Milan – 1992
Botticelli, “Saint Catherine of Alexandria” 1487, (Detail).
”Capture
The unique,
The fugitive,
The essential,
That is art. ”
Marguerite Duras
Yves Pires (bronze).
“Here is the first presentiment of eternity. To have time for love.”
Rainer Maria Rilke