We recently stumbled on this video the great Chistophe Niemann created to accompany a clip from Terry Gross’ last interview with 80-year-old Maurice Sendak, a few months before his death. It is full of wise, achingly tender words:

There’s something I’m finding out as I’m aging — that I am in love with the world…I look right now, as we speak together, out my window in my studio, and I see my trees, my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years old. And you see I can see how beautiful they are. 

I can take time to see how beautiful they are.

Sylvia Plimack Mangold Summer Maple 2009; Alexander and Bonin Gallery

Our friend Maureen Rolla turned his words into a kind of blessing:

I hope you will have time to…

– Enjoy the trees outside your window

– Write, draw, or make something artful

– Remember your friends, living and dead

– Most of all, “Live your life. Live your life. Live your life”.

The best advice ever.

Sylvia Plimack’s sublime paintings of Maples seemed fitting. She made MANY, often of the same tree.  We found a pleasurable trove of her work at Alexander and Bonin. We wrote about her here.

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