Years ago, in Paris, I visited the Rodin Museum in Rue de Varenne. I recommend it.
The museum is a big beautiful house full of Rodin’s sculptures, and in a rear garden, 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.
It was easy to walk round and round it and this I did many times, becoming more and more aware of a presence in that terracotta head.
I was happy the other museum visitors were elsewhere, looking at The Thinker, and I had the sculpture all to myself, because from it I felt a communication and needed time alone to figure and observe.
As I looked she became more and more alive and I became more and more taken, and wondered just how Rodin might have imbued her with that aliveness.
Or perhaps it was the spirit of the woman who had sat for him that lingered.
What I was experiencing was not just an enlivened thing. I was experiencing- a life.
You may 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 myself, could have been giving her life.
We all did this easily as children with our teddy bears and dolls and sometimes, even something like the garden gate.
We made those things alive.
My point here is:
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.
Best wishes
Joe