The night of the tulips
Watercolour and marker
on watercolour paper
9 x 12 inches
Barbara Muir © 2013
Eleanor Wachtel is interviewing Yoko Ono tonighton Wachtel on the Arts on CBC Radio. Eleanor is
such a super interviewer and the music
she's playing by Yoko Ono sounds quite cheerful.
Yoko's story is a rough one. She lost John Lennon,
her third husband, the famous Beatle in 1980.
And Ono also lived through her second husband's
abduction of her daughter, Kyoko in 1971, and lost contact
with her daughter until 1994. And yet she sounds
happy, exuberant.
Ono is quite inspiring -- so alive and young sounding
at 80. In a way she's like Lucian Freud, the artist
I'm reading about this week. Freud was still working
on several paintings per day in his 80s. Yoko is so
electric and alive in what most people would consider
very old age. She's just put out a new album, and has a
major retrospective exhibit on -- the Half-A-Wind Show,
that opened in Frankfurt, Germany in February.
Yoko says to Eleanor, "Think about it, we [women]
created the human race." True, Yoko, but I think it's
lucky that we didn't have to create it alone. Yoko's point
is that if you've ever witnessed a woman giving birth,
risking her own life in the process, you know that women
aren't weak. But I think artists (men and women) are
brave because we create worlds of our own -- in
fact that is our daily work.
You might enjoy the interview. I did. Here's the
painting I started while I was listening. I thought it
would make a nice break from my self-portraits.
At this point those could only become even more
disturbing. Let's give the antibiotics a couple of days!
Have an enjoying-learning-about-other-artists day.
