"Les Enfants du Paradis" is a French black-and-white movie released in 1945, and starring Jean-Luis Barrault as the sad and dreamy mine Baptiste, Arletty as the beautiful and mysterious Garance, Pierre Brasseur as the brash actor Frederic Lemaitre who competes with Baptiste for Garance's heart, and Maria Casares as Natalie, hopelessly in love with the hopelessly-in-love Baptiste.
Obviously this setup makes for a lot of bitter-sweetness and heartbreaks, but the movie is sheer poetry, without ever going beyond the pale of the sugary, kitschy or clicheed. Perhaps the fact that it sports some of the most outstanding acting *ever* in a movie has got something to do with it - Barrault's miming is enough in itself to make the movie worthwhile, but the other actors are easily on par.

The painting is not trying to render any particular scene, but rather to portray the flair of the different characters - Garance (nomen est omen) and Baptiste dominate the painting with their larger-than-life yearning for each other, and the other characters play their little charades in the center of the picture, among frolicking Paris night life.
And who is the green clown, you may ask? Well, he (or rather she, I would say) sneaked in after I watched a brilliant group of clowns from Moscow perform at the MIR parade - a street arts event uniting artists from both sides of what then still was the Iron Curtain, which shortly preceded the collapse of the latter - although at the time we obviously didn't know that yet... but yes, Perestroika had definitely started then.
The painting is dated 1991, but I started it quite a while earlier, in 1988 I guess, or even 1987 - before the Berlin wall came down in any case, and before my seven year painting break, which I only broke once, in fact, to complete this very painting. It is also the first in a large series of paintings where the moon features prominently. Well, in this case, it is straight out of the movie! Watch it, and you'll understand... :-)

© 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 Asni

all artwork © Asni

last updated: 1 February, 2005