“A creator needs only one enthusiast to justify him” ~ Man Ray

Man Ray is one of the artists that heavily inspired and influenced my creativity from the earliest age. I remember studying him at length during my college years. Today I was able to visit the exhibition at the Legion of Honor Museum called Man Ray Lee Miller: Partners in Surrealism and it was quite good. The whole love affair between Man Ray and Lee Miller is beautifully documented and his famous "lips" below make a whole lot more sense now.

Of the image of the lips in this painting Man Ray wrote in 1935:

It is seven in the morning, before satisfying an imaginary hunger – the sun not yet decided whether to rise or to set – that your mouth comes to replace all these indecisions [...] Your mouth itself becomes two bodies, separated by a long, undulating horizon. Like the earth and the sky, like you and me ... Lips of the sun, you ceaselessly attract me, and in the instant before I wake up, when I detach myself from my body ... I meet you in the neutral light and in the void of space, and, sole reality, I kiss you with everything that is still left in me – my own lips.

(Quoted in Arturo Schwarz, Man Ray: The Rigour of Imagination, London 1977, p.61.)

Man Ray (1890–1976). A l’heure de l’observatoire—les amoureux (Observatory Time—The Lovers), c. 1931; color photograph, 1964, after the original oil painting. The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. © 2011 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo © The Israel Museum by Avshalom Avital