IOKANAAN

A love story pt 2.

These are crabsticks.

A love story.

I T M E

One of mine, in Indian ink again. Love is just a way of slowly killing yourself.

With closed eyes, Balthus's pubescent model is lost in thought. Thérèse Blanchard, who was about twelve or thirteen at the time this picture was made, and her brother Hubert were neighbors of Balthus in Paris. She appears alone, with her cat, or with her brother in a series of eleven paintings done between 1936 and 1939. Thérèse inaugurated the leitmotif of the artist’s oeuvre, of a girl poised between childhood and adolescence. Balthus often rebuked the suggestion of eroticism in his work, instead placing any form of ribaldry firmly in the mind of the viewer.

Me trying to get a date