Dear Camille,

I saw you first in the eyes of Rodin.

A softly rendered plaster bust of a gentle face, head tilted to the side, eyes downcast.

I didn’t realise it was your hands which had shaped, in turn, that famous bust of Rodin. To my shame I took in its strength, the prominent nose and cutting cheekbones, cast in bronze and thought only ‘oh is this Rodin?’.
He has given you an entire wing in the house that has become his museum.

A manifestation of his admiration and perhaps also his own regret.

Please do not begrudge him too much. Many others besides myself would not have known of your shared influence if not for this. You now have a museum of your own. It is called ‘Musee Camille Claudel’.

I can feel the raw sensuality, the tangible realism, of the emotional states you were able to construct out of clay. It is such an endless waste to have been confined to the asylum for over 30 years. Prevented from continuing to develop your artistic legacy. After all, how could a woman who did not conform to the taste of society in your time not frighten people? How could she be labeled a genius in her own time and not be considered dangerous? You wished to assert yourself outside the brand of that former lover. In my time that singleminded determination would have been admired.

They say you struggled with depression and anxiety. I’m curious how you could not when it seemed all the odds were stacked against you?

They say you struggled with paranoia when they locked you away. That you believed Rodin was trying to sabotage you in the Parisian Art world as a powerful gatekeeper. However, were there not real barriers erected against you and the challenge you represented to the status quo, especially once you had dissolved your relationship. If you were male, would they have questioned your tendency to keep to your own studio in the final years of your freedom? Would they have questioned a man’s disinclination towards managing the day to day affairs of the domestic? Would they have used this as justification for imprisonment? Would a man have the power to do so to his brother in the same way he could to his sister, if she remained unmarried and became in essence his property upon the death their father.

I created this painting on copper for you. This copper support is a material I came to and developed though my own experimentation. This material effects the colour of the pigments which I grind and mix with oil, altering the appearance of these colours until the oil sets and stabilises the reactions. I hope both the experimental and the temporal nature of this material will resonate with you, as I know in your own work you were interested in time as a subject.

The overall composition of my painting takes its inspiration from your work ‘The Wave’ (1897). I was interested in how you transformed Japanese artist Hokusai’s woodblock print ‘The Great Wave’, into a wall of water carved from greenish onyx marble, suspended over three crouching figures holding hands. In my work I transformed this wave into a descending wall of virga, a type of rain that never hits the ground. This spoke to me of your lost potential. The work you didn’t get to produce, just like the rain, will not touched the ground. Lost to the atmosphere above the figures who crouch, vulnerable and nude in anticipation of an event that may not occur.

The virga in such a way also represents a threat. I have struggled with depression too in the past. The threat of being drenched, while in a vulnerable sate, seemed to perfectly evoke emotional threat of events happening outside of my control threatening to destabilise my internal equilibrium. This scene occurs in my little studio.

You probably recognise the position I took for each of the three figures, which I drew from life in mirrors. In this, I drew inspiration from an earlier work you made, ‘Woman Crouched’, of a single three dimensional figure crouching in on herself in a self protective position. Was this influenced by the Crouching Aphrodite in the Louvre? I took up the position of this figure and viewed it from different angles, duplicating her into three figures so that your three dimensional composition could be viewed with my flat two dimensional medium. The figures are somewhere between a real person and your sculpture. Not quite the colour of stone. I felt that each figure could represent a different point in time in a person’s life, with a different perspective on said life.
​A beginning, a middle and an end.

Yours truly,
Natasha