foxonthego

Saddened but somehow, oddly, uplifted this week by Oscar Neimeyer’s passing… I seem to be surrounded by death at the moment…

104! and what a legacy… working until almost the end and such fantastic architecture…

“When you have a large space to conquer, the curve is the natural solution,” he said. “I once wrote a poem about the curve. The curve I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuousness of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean and on the body of the beloved woman.”

Reminded me of a number of curves I’ve known… from the Venus of Willendorf who came into view several decades ago, fascinating me, as I helped my first husband, the painter, cram for his art history exams… to the stunning curves of ‘elephant mountain’ in Vietnam where my last husband and I once spent a Christmas, with crazy motorcycle adventures and rather a lot of waterfalls and gluwein shared with a bunch of fellow travellers met en route from Sweden…

I love curves… whether in a majestic mountain skyline or drifting cloud formations lazily observed from a gently swinging hammock or the embracing, protective arms and elegant necks of Rodin’s lovers or the laconic flourish of a graceful toe in a tango or arabesques in blue ceramic panels or the generous, sweeping scrolls of a Niemeyer building… they have competed with angular phallic skyscrapers and memorial columns for centuries but, in reality, even the phallus is curved, isn’t it?!

I love curves… am even beginning to love my own curves… and the curve of his shoulder and forearms makes me melt… but, primal urges aside, curves for me represent change, movement, evolution… they are somehow, in their seamlessness, full of hope… moving, arching towards something… full of promise, the future… even the word itself rolls… is almost onomatopoeic…

I love curves… pebbles on the beach… washed smooth by the gentle waves of an aqua sea… I have a little collection of white ones… picked on a Sardinian sunset stroll not so long ago… a meander down memory lane after almost two decades, a youth rediscovered, a lost love found… our passion then was brief, magnificent… like the glorious crimson gladiolas which grew too high and fast under an intense Italian sun and collapsed from their own weight… you didn’t love them enough, he said… you didn’t love me enough, I said… decades later, like the pebbles, we, washed mellow and tender with the tides of life, strolled on a beach, wrapped in each other, our youth reflected in each other and watched the sun set on the curved back of the ‘sleeping man’ hill across the bay…

beautiful, curve-alicious moments along the journey…