Marie Antoinette

MY MUSE

Like I said in a previous post  I love this woman, this ancient French queen, Marie Antoinette. I think she got such a bum rap when she was here a few hundred years ago when she walked this Earth in royal garbs and made the fatal mistake of being an Austrian on the French throne. A big part of her problems, I think, was that she was a foreigner. Never be a foreigner. No matter who and where you are.

I love the way that everything was all her fault. Don't you? An entire revolution. All Marie's fault. Typically, women don't have any power in society - even the aristocracy and the monarchy but she was all powerful. It was her fault that Paris did not have any bread.


Well you know what? I am not buying it. I don't buy it and I never will buy it. They set her up to take the wrap. They made her the heavy and the fall guy. They scapegoated that poor girl and I am not going to join them, like sheep, and blame her for everything.

Makes me so mad.

Was she a complex human being? More than likely, yes. There was more than just a little bit of nuanced complexity there. But who among us is completely uncomplex? Was she selfish and self-absorbed? Maybe a bit too into herself and her frivolous pursuits like fashion, luxury and lovers? Probably. But show me a woman who is not the very same and you have shown me Mother Theresa. And to my way of thinking, there can only be one Mother Theresa. That Saint has died, god rest her soul and everybody else is just basically human, and flawed, like little Marie Antoinette. So whatever were her shortcomings and her sins, I forgive her. And I let her inspire me every single day. So there.

So anyway, as I said before, this is supposed to be her that I am painting. It is not finished. Her hair is all effed up so I have to do something. The photo is based on a photo on the cover of the book by Evelyn Lever. Do you know that book?

This painting has been a work in progress for about five years now. I keep changing it and on a certain level, I think it is getting worse not better and I can almost hear her whisper "you are making a hot mess of me, please stop!"  But I carry on. I keep trying to make it better and more perfect but even unforeseen events conspire against us. The very last thing was an old bookcase. A giant, old, heavy, mammoth thing that I had to disassemble all by myself to make way for a new one that I finally was able to purchase. Make a long story short, I had a massive accident in the apartment and the whole mammoth thing came tumbling down and one of its edges fell into Marie and made a massive hole close to her buttocks.

I cried.

But there it is. She has flaws. Even her painting is flawed.

And yes, I do talk to her almost every day and ask her opinions on stuff that I am going through. And it is almost like she responds!  And another thing is, when I sleep, I get the feeling that her ghost walks through my apartment and re-arranges me things. She really thinks, I kid you not, that this is her apartment.