Femmes sur la Plage
Joan Miró’s, Femmes sur la Plage (1940)
©The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Image Source: Art Resource, NY
When I was a teenager, I vividly remember the experience of seeing Joan Miró’s Femmes Sur la Plage (Women on the Beach) in Pier 1, of all places. I was captivated by the title and abstraction from reality. It captured my imagination and I thought it was really wild! That is my earliest recollection of discovering Modern Art and the impact it can carry.
Then, forty-four years ago, while living in Pacific Palisades, CA, and experimenting with plein air oil painting, I met my Femmes sur la Plage, Sandora, who would become my wife and life partner. It was on a Saturday morning in spring, as she was moving into the same small, garden apartment complex, on Sunset Boulevard, just a short walk to the beach. In fact, she moved right into the apartment just below mine. (Think broomstick knocking on the ceiling!)
We spent more and more time together, walking our dogs in the canyon and beach, listening to music, talking late into the night about art. The Getty Museum, (the earlier, villa version on Pacific Coast Highway 1), was just a few minutes away, and a favorite haunt. The collection of art was unbelievable—without any ropes to keep me distanced from the art. I could get up close and completely immersed in and study the smallest details and brushstrokes. We also frequented the Norton Simon, LACMA, and the many galleries and art openings in downtown LA, Santa Monica and Venice, running the gamut of different forms and expressions of art. It was through getting to know Sandora, that I became more and more intrigued with modern and contemporary art, artists and various mediums.
At the time, Sandora had a photography studio in Hollywood, and I found a funky studio within a sprawling industrial complex in Santa Monica, rife with creatives from all areas of the spectrum. This was an intensely fertile, interactive and inspiring environment and time in our life. For me it was a time of experimentation with welding, painting, temporal installations, and gorilla art.
All these years later, Sandora is still my best friend—my everything. I can’t imagine living without her. She inspires me with everything she does. Sandora is a beautiful poet and a world-class, creative photographer, descending from a family of artists. Her father was just 25 years old when he photographed Frank Lloyd Wright’s infamous Falling Water house. Her mother was an innovative potter and renaissance woman, in so many ways. Art was a way of life for them and I craved that, too.
With Sandora, everything in our lives became about art. Over the years we have forged new artistic paths together. That is what we continue to do today, and will keep on keeping on… creating, and enjoying the unfolding journey, together.
