The fine line between art and life.

I saw this spectacular photography show today. Here is this amazingly honest, fearless and artistically gifted woman, who, in spite of all she had to say through her camera - chose to leave us at the painfully tender age of twenty-two.

These things are such an emotional maelstrom for me. As an art lover, I have come to accept the realities of the artist's process and to resist being maudlin or judgey or sentimental about their professional and personal journeys and choices. It serves no purpose to ask why...only to try to capture the most fleeting acknowledgment of insight or appreciation.

That's all well and good when I get into my academic head, I actually rather enjoy the psychic study as much as the composition or aesthetics. But this particular artist is exactly the age, stage and gender of my most precious of all qualifiers. I can't be objective looking at work after work, one self-study after another, wondering, wondering....what was going through that beautiful head while she was creating so ambitiously and with such authority. It is impossible not to superimpose the one's I love over her and imagine the infinite and blessedly unrealized What-Ifs.

I'm not sure what I am feeling here and now, but I know how grateful I am to the rooms, the people in them, and my HP that helped me keep my head up and keep moving forward when I could have let my fear consume me. I am grateful that I didn't have to face the unthinkable as this young woman's mother did, but I know I am infinitely grateful for her exquisitely documented legacy. That is my gratitude list for today.