Marc Chagall was born July 7 in 1887.

“Love and fantasy, go hand in hand.”

If one has read this blog, there are other posts on Marc Chagall. He's a favorite of mine, what I call a true Romantic in the literary tradition. He so believed in love. I look at this and I see two people, flying over a world that is full of the usual conflicts and troubles, etc. But they have embraced each other in complete trust. Not in complete perfection, because there is no such thing, but in an agreement to trust and be themselves, to be honest, to support one another. This has to be the finest kind of love. There is no doubt that Chagall and his wife had such a relationship, that he loved her very much, and she loved him. Bella Rosenfeld Chagall died tragically and unexpectedly from a bacteria infection a few years after Chagall and her fled occupied France in 1941. For many months, Chagall could not paint at all, and what stirred him to return to work was Bella's memory as she became symbiotic with all the Jews dead in that terrible, dark war. His second marriage was much more an agreement for companionship that had more to do with his being an older man living alone, etc. I'll write more on this later. This statement is not meant to diminish the importance of Vava Brodsky in Chagall's life. It was just a very different kind of relationship.

Chagall incorporated elements of fantasy into his art by the way he showed his memories. He loved the circus. He loved clowns. He loved lovers and kisses. This is all very important to my own work, to my own heart's desires. There is always an element of fantasy when it comes to love, the way we dream it, think about it, act it out, couple with each other, in moments of shared intimacy, whatever that intimacy may be. I like to think that Chagall and Bella were happy lovers and friends and told each other stories and even fought with each other with the same passion that they loved one another. No one paints like Chagall. There is really no one to compare him to, unless one thinks of color and then Matisse. Chagall's focus was narrow. But there was only one of his kind. Those are the magical people to me. The ones who really are alone in the world except maybe they have a trusted lover. These creatives live in their own heads, they create their own imaginative universes.

Happy Birthday, Chagall. I am posting one day early because I might not be able to do Internet tomorrow. I've art to make.