Thursday 18 June 2009

' When I was an adolescent, my father scolded me for wanting to drive to Florida with a friend. It was too far from home, he said and I would be corrupted by the distance. I was sixteen. I'd been brought up in a small farm community and had barely been more than a hundred miles from home. neither had he. At least not more than once or twice. he hated travel and was rooted in the ground he stood on. the world for him was his front porch and it made him who he was.

-opening paragraph to 'the world from my porch' Larry Towell

This slightly reminds me of the Herni Rousseau, don't you just love the idea that people can believe that you can be corrupted by distance.

'His best known paintings depict jungle scenes, even though he never left France or saw a jungle. Stories spread by admirers that his army service included the French expeditionary force to Mexico are unfounded. His inspiration came from illustrated books and the botanical gardens in Paris, as well as tableaux of taxidermied wild animals. He had also met soldiers, during his term of service, who had survived the French expedition to Mexico and listened to their stories of the subtropical country they had encountered. To the critic Arsène Alexandre, he described his frequent visits to the Jardin des Plantes: "When I go into the glass houses and I see the strange plants of exotic lands, it seems to me that I enter into a dream."

1 comment:

Nisha Alberti said...

people can get corrupted by anything :) apparently my grandma's sister had a suitor come round to her house, but she didn't really like him, and my grandma said she'd gotten too many romantic notions from all those books she'd been reading.
rousseau's cunningly built up life of rumours and lies is pretty impressive though :D