Move through the centuries and meet the lives lived in each.

Johannes Vermeer

1675 - Delft

Nearby in time, but facing a different kind of historical pressure.

I have not lost the work.

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Vincent van Gogh

1890 - Auvers-sur-Oise

art-and-creation

A contrasting life shaped by art and creation.

I am thirty-seven years old and the mornings here in Auvers open like pale wounds that at once become doors, the white of the sky before sunrise so thin it is almost not there, and then suddenly all the wheat, the roofs, the paths, the cypresses farther off, the church tower, the chalk of the roads, even the black crows when they rise late and violently as if shaken out of the fields by some hand under the earth, all of it begins to burn without flame and then there is only one possible answer to that kind of light, which is work, work at once, work before the pressure changes its colour, before the afternoon comes with its pushing, with the inward crowding that is not merely in the head but in the whole air around the head, as if the day itself had leaned too close.

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Edgar Degas

1917 - Paris

art-and-creation

A contrasting life shaped by art and creation.

I am eighty-three years old, and if the matter is to be stated without the sentimental falsity with which old age is usually surrounded by those who do not yet suffer it, I am blind enough for the practical arts to have been taken from me and not blind enough to be spared the humiliation of knowing precisely what has been taken.

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Paul Cézanne

1906 - Aix-en-Provence.

art-and-creation

A contrasting life shaped by art and creation.

I went back to the motif after the collapse because the motif remains what it is regardless of the body, and if the body now protests, falters, surrenders its force in the rain beneath the mountain, that does not alter the mountain’s necessity or the unfinished canvas waiting in the studio with the same quiet and intolerable right it possessed the day before I dropped in the field.

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Elvis Presley

1977 - Graceland

exile-and-decline

A contrasting life shaped by exile and decline.

In the upstairs office at Graceland with the curtains drawn against the Memphis heat and Lisa Marie somewhere down in the house, I am setting my own account down on a yellow legal pad in the days before the tour opens in Portland, Maine on the seventeenth of August, still certain that the voice and the show will answer when I call them the way they always have, even as the body slows under me and the house closes in around the certainty.

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Bruce Lee

1973 - Hong Kong (Golden Harvest studios, Kowloon)

art-and-creation

A contrasting life shaped by art and creation.

Raymond has the morning's call sheet at the editing bay and the choreographer's apprentice is at the small stage with the third pickup's blocking, and I keep my hand on the storyboard because if Raymond sees the headache at the level of yesterday's storyboard he will postpone the third pickup to Friday, and the third pickup is the pickup Game of Death's nunchaku sequence requires before the Friday's stage call.

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