6 Degrees of Separation

This has been a little strange...I keep on remembering that movie the one where everyone is connected to someone by degrees..I think it was six (6) degrees of separation.  Kevin Bacon was in it or doing it.

See the two pictures of the flowing river?  One was painted by a good friend of mine, Riichiro Kawashima, a Japanese gentleman who had attended art school in Chicago and spoke excellent English.  I've written about him in my other journal on Japan.

I've always felt that my unborn child, Kenji, absorbed some of this man's tremendous talent as I sat watching him paint and listened to him speaking about his life.

Well, as many of you know, I have a store on Ebay...I wanted to list some small oil paintings that I no longer want...so I was roaming through the listings trying to gauge a price.

Oh, of a sudden I see a painting that strikes a familiar cord!  It's a painting almost of the same view...maybe 60 years later in Paris on the Seine River....I felt looking at these two that the artist must of stood within feet of each other to be able to paint it so.

I was amazed.  I had located my friends painting in a museum and was able to copy it to my computer...lord knows how much the original is.  Kawashima-sensei had for my wedding given my husband & I paintings, sketched & water colors for different rooms in our house....they were beautiful and much appreciated.  My mother-in-law who was Mrs. Kawashima's friend did not want the art to leave Japan when Tom & I were transferred back to the States.  So with heavy heart, the artwork was left in her care for us to retrieve upon our return to Japan. 

Well, not to bore anyone ... we never made that return trip together.   It's a common tale of separation & divorce....I would have been happy to pull a "Shirley Maclaine" but he needed someone there - he dreaded being "alone".....not realizing how "alone" he had made me during the last years of us.

But when I think of the time watching Kawashima-san paint..it makes me remember the happier times so filled with hope & promise.

So I really, really want that second picture.....I think I'm going to bid.....

PS. The reason I put the other picture of an artist wearing his little french cap sitting in front of an easel painting Irises....That's exactly my memory of watching him......one of the paintings that he had given us was a huge beautiful oil of blue. purple Irises with vibrant green hued stalks rising amid the flowers....his style was very impressionistic, colorful like his idols Van Gogh, Monet and Picasso....