Madame Pickwick Art Blog Art and media blog of the unexpected

Surreal Art That Mimes Life

He died penniless. He died hungry, sick and in complete solitude. Lonely and compartmentalized. Thats how the curtain fell on French mime artist Marcel Marceau. Sixty years of work and an encore of ending his existence in an empty room illuminated with a single bare lightbulb, this poet of silence now passed to the greater quiet beyond the melancholy he had so skillfully articulated in his lifetime.

Collection, The Third Eye, 1982

”Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?/We all sit here stranded though were all doing our best to deny it/And Louise holds a handful of rain/Tempting you to defy it/Lights flicker from the opposite loft/In this room the heat pipes just cough/the country music station plays soft/But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off/”( Bob Dylan,Visions of Johanna, 1966 )

Marceau was also a visual artist; an accomplished painter and printmaker .His collection of canvasses were produced under the heading ”The Third Eye” which was accompanied by written text in poetic form. The poetry and paintings are deeply inspired by the imagery and mystical qualities of the work of William Blake. There is metaphysical and astral overtones presented in the form of expressionism.

Marcel Marceau

Marceau’s main palette was vivid tones of blue, rose and mauve done in watercolors,ink, pencil and tempera gouache. His estate auctioned off his art to pay off considerable debts he had accumulated. Yvan Boascher told the BBC at the auction: ”His paintings reflect for me the madness of his mind, whatever was going on in his head was not classical it was surreal.”

Marcel Marceau

Marceau was a comic entertainer who in another sense thought in a serious, revelatory manner. It was his personal commentary on despair and  he fulfilled the artists role in society to put the world back into equilibrium; to sacrifice part of himself to prevent the world from tipping into greater madness.

From ”The Third Eye”: The spirit sweeps into the midst of lightning’s volley’s and the thunder’s snarl/space is rent/Live force of the beyond and the divine, the world makes itself in our own image/Beauty and ugliness embrace through visions of the universe where life and death map out their frontiers/