Fallen Angels

Fragment of thoughts after the death of a young artist….

“Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

One of the lessons I have learned about life is that the sooner we can get rid of believing there is any solid ground beneath our feet the better we can navigate our life and art. You never quite get it all together, there is no safety net and it is futile to continuously seek pleasure and try to avoid pain. There is nowhere to hide. There is no salvation from us. I believe that artist are like explorers, we are seduced by new ideas and passion, we are curious and often times obsessed with our own tortured talent. At times our curiosity is larger than our courage to actually face the ideas that delight us. It is the curse of an artist to desire ethereal perfection. Life is upward and downward and the emotional view is always changing from joy, to sadness, voluptuousness to emaciated. It is the taunting ambiguity of brilliance that can vaporize our lives if we do not wear wings, which can stand the glare of such intense heat. Time and death have no place in the heart of artist; we are consumed with our own confessions of wanting, dreaming hoping and creating. But once in awhile when we loose a great talent so young, an artist who is held captive by opiated dreams and bored with modern life we witness the myth of a tortured artist incarnate. The ‘live fast die young’ story is too often about the tail of the comet streaking through time like a fire of light beckoning to the depths of space with their incandescence. They dare the rest of us to take notice.  They become the fallen angels exiled from earth. R.I.P Amy…..