[LCR]

Letter from Nicolas de Stael to Jacques Dyuburu
Antibes, the end of December 1954

Dear Jacques

Thank you for your letter. Perhaps what I write to you, it will be difficult to read, but in a different way does not work.
Most importantly, what I am trying to achieve, it is continuously updated from one job to another, without caesura, and it is very difficult. I know that my painting, apart from the outside in it, from the noise and fury, the constant playing with force, is very fragile, is fragile in the best sense of the word. She is fragile, like love. I think that trying to - to the extent where I can control myself - to work more or less complete because of my ability, and when I sketch on canvas large format, when the work finally becomes good, I always ubiystenno see that It is the most random, it's like vertigo - a fluke, which is expressed in the work force, but remains in the accident, as though the virtuosity vice versa, and from that I fall into a state of complete hopelessness. I can not comprehend all the work, and this chance to finally penetrate even in the three-meter work, I have been working slowly and deliberately, putting a few strokes in a day.

I can not control the process in the full sense of the word - if it makes sense - I would like to learn how to work quite deliberately, and even if I work fast, stay calm until the end.

I arrived in Antibes, to try to change in this direction. If you can help me, I return to Paris is not until June, and we put the best of my canvases you. I know that people can not endure such loneliness. I do not know how to get uui him, but I know that it could seriously advance me in my work. Actually, I do not know whether the word "push", but it does not matter, it is important that I should try, the game worth the candle. If I endure this loneliness for a few years, believe me, mopi work will be quite different, and you, Jacques, will be the most enviable place in the world, because you will be selling paintings, each of which will be an event beyond the control of all known laws of each of which will be completely truthful.
The fact that I am changing from one painting to another, from one period to another, for me, normally, as if already overtaken by the work somewhere in the mist, as soon as they are completed.
But it may be that all this - just a dream idiot? Regardless, I will keep myself in the unknown tomorrow until his death.
Sign the picture for me, it does not matter. Those that I sent you, I signed on wet, incised signature nail.

Happy holidays to you, Jacques.
I will wait your letter.

Nicolas