Years ago, in Paris, me and Deborah stopped by the Rodin Museum in Rue de Varenne. I recommend it.
The museum is a big beautiful house full of Rodin’s sculptures and a rear garden where lives his outdoor sculptures.
While Deborah lingered in the garden I went indoors, drawn by a small terracotta head of a young woman placed on a shoulder-high pedestal in the middle of the ground floor and easy to walk round, which I did many times, becoming aware of a presence in that terracotta head. I was happy the other visitors were elsewhere, looking at The Thinker and I was alone with her.
As I looked she became more and more alive and I became more and more taken.
Rodin had imbued her with life, or perhaps it was the spirit of the woman who had sat for him that lingered.
Yet what I experienced was not just an enlivened thing. I was experiencing- a life.
I guess you might say it was imagination, but then imagination is everything at times.
You see, when you have something beautiful before you, it’s easy to give it life.
Some of your own life, if you like-I mean, I could have been giving her life.
We all did this easily as children with our teddy bears and dolls and sometimes, even the garden gate.
We made those things alive.
My point is this:
Have beautiful things in your environment and even if you don’t think you can make them alive, you will feel better.
So think of us, whenever you have the urge to splash some colour on those dead walls around your home and make them come alive.