"Georges," they said, "blue is a sad colour."It is the colour of a woman's eyeslifted above the shining streets,Pigalle, after April rain.Blue descends on my lifelike the silence of a square at dawn;it walks beyond the market shadowsto ape their subtle castingand is the first of all colours to fade.
Yesterday the sands were bursting with pink flesh,rivulet tides of vanishing whiteclung to the ankles of children in greenas a woman shook her morning sheetsout the window of the grand hotel.I have never been able to paint from the past.
I came because I felt the needto reconstruct the sadness in my life --because of all the mornings of despairthere may have been a time when I was happy.Things prove themselves wholly by accumulation.
I may have been a loverand flung the very edges of the citybeyond the grasp of promises and lies.But love was never a fiction of mineand therefore, subject to fail.Last night I listened to the waves.
"But Georges, there are no people there.""And none in portraiture as well," I said.Nothing that I ask for can be true --I asked for vision and was given paint,for assurance and received a brush.Even walking by the sea at dawnI could not fix the exact sensationof sand grains in my shoe.
The beach settled in a canvasof feelings that I could not chain.I was confronted by what I had not done.
And then there was that skiff with darkened sailsand the fiction of its helmsmanheading out toward the sea,who through the textures of a foreign mindmight, point by exacting point, realizethe ice-blue calm of a single manwho stood watching from the empty strandas if the loneliest beneath blue sky.
