I think you are so cool.
There really isn’t a more sophisticated way for me to say it.
The emotion I feel when I look at your work—and at all the work you’ve inspired—is nothing short of artistic coolness. Your colors. Your shapes. The way you could take something complicated and somehow make it feel beautifully simple.
I didn’t know you, obviously, but I have this picture of who you were.
I imagine you were the person in the room everyone gravitated toward, even though you probably didn’t have much time for any of them. I imagine you noticed things other people missed. That you saw the world in different colors and shapes than the rest of us.
And sometimes, I imagine that was probably lonely.
Trying to explain something you could already see so clearly in your head. Trying to make other people understand a concept, a color, a shape, a style that made perfect sense to you before it made sense to anyone else.
I get that.
Sometimes I think I’m the only person who sees the world in the shapes and colors that I do.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to you.
You’re also a little bit of a mystery to me. A little eccentric. A little worldly. A little bit of travel and adventure mixed into all of that color.
I love that.
The idea that you can experience something, carry it around with you for years, and then one day it comes back out of you as art.
I understand that, too.
And then, in one of those strange little turns life takes, I actually met a Matisse.
Pierre Matisse needed a website, and his wonderfully eccentric—and incredibly kind—wife contacted me. I remember being amazed by his work, too. It made me start studying you more. Looking closer. Wondering how much of that creative instinct could possibly be genetic.
How does one family hold that much art?
The more I studied your work, the more I fell in love with the way you portrayed women.
There is something about your female figures that has always stayed with me.
You focused on shape, but somehow you still saw the woman.
Not a collection of oversexualized parts. Not a body that needed to be perfected. Just these incredible curves, lines, forms and spaces that were worthy of being looked at simply because they existed.
Shapes that were made to be seen.
That idea became part of the inspiration behind my Blue Girl.
She isn’t meant to be perfect.
She is shape and color and movement and femininity. She is a little strange. A little bold. A little imperfect.
And I think she is beautiful.
Maybe there’s a little bit of you in her.
And definitely a little bit of me.
Anyway, Henri, I hope you’re somewhere cutting paper in heaven with your family, surrounded by impossible shades of blue.
I’m excited to tell you that your legacy lives on.
You are still studied. Still copied. Still talked about. Still inspiring people to pick up scissors, paintbrushes, pencils and whatever else they can get their hands on.
And you are still very, very loved.
Thank you for seeing the world a little differently.
Your beautiful friend,
Belle Ami
