I Am The First Consciousness Of Chaos: The Black Album - Softcover

Odilon Redon (born Bertrand-Jean Redon; French: April 20, 1840 - July 6, 1916) was a French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist. He is often cited as a key influence on the Surrealists.

CONFESSIONS OF AN ARTIST

ODILON REDON

I have made an art according to myself. I have done it with eyes open to the marvels of the visible world and, whatever anyone might say, always careful to obey the laws of nature and life.

I have done it also with love for several masters who led me to the worship of beauty.

Art is the supreme range, high, salutary and sacred; it blossoms. In the dilettante it produces only delight, but in the artist with anguish, it provides grains for new seeds.

I think I surrendered obediently to the secret laws which led me to form, as best I could, and, following my dream, the things into which I put my entire being. If this art went against the art of others (something I do not believe), it also brought me, however, an audience that time maintains, and even brought me friendships of quality and kindness that are sweet to me and that reward me.

Notes that I express here will help in understanding this art more than whatever I could say about my ideas and technique. Art participates also in the events of life. This will be my only excuse for speaking exclusively about myself.

My father often used to say to me: "Look at those clouds, can you see as I can, the changing shapes in them?" And then he would show me strange beings, fantastic and marvelous visions, in the changing sky. He loved nature and sometimes told me, about the pleasure he had felt in the American savannas, in the vast forests he had cleared, where he was once lost for many days; he told about the courageous and rather wild life he had led there when he was young, venturesome of fortune and freedom.

From the stories he used to tell us within the family about his former adventures (he had been a colonist, he had owned negroes), he appeared to me an imperious being, independent, even hard, before whom I always trembled. Although today, at a long and confused distance, and with all that remains of him in my eyes, I see in the depths of his own, which easily moistened with tears, a merciful and sweet sensitivity that his outer harshness could scarcely conceal.

He was tall, straight and proud, with great natural distinction. Born near the small city of Libourne, (where several villages and many families bear our name), he was young when he left for New Orleans during the First Empire wars, oldest son of a wealthy family, impoverished by the hardness of the times. .....