A Hodgepodge: Divorcing Cary Grant, painting on suede, and...delirium !
Writing in a trance and moving to Morocco after loving/leaving a Hollywood husband.
❥ This email may be truncated in your inbox. To make sure you are reading the entire post, please move yourself along to a web browser!
All photographs and words here are my own, unless otherwise stated. More from me + Absolument can be found in these places:
Website | Instagram | Shop Absolument | Book Recs - Merci, thank you tons and tons for reading!
Because life truly never slows down, it’s the perfect time for another Hodgepodge writing. Below, I’ll dance around the themes of interior design, painting, the words of a cherished author, and a little bit of 1960s Hollywood.
Divorcing Cary Grant and moving to Morocco:
Cary Grant is my sole celebrity crush, especially in his To Catch A Thief wardrobe! He was also Barbara Hutton’s crush for a short while, until she divorced him. They were each other’s third spouses; she had seven in total, him five. Their couple’s nickname was "Cash and Cary”—because they married right after her $50 million inheritance came in. Alright, I’ll stop gossiping.
In 1961, House & Garden magazine covered the post-divorce home of the “troubled American heiress” in Tangier, Morocco.
The colors, the Venetian glass chandeliers, the traditional Moresque patterned textiles, the glistening artwork, everything jeweled—wow. Surely, this place would heal me of heartbreak, too.
The words of Italo Calvino:
Calvino is in my top three favorite authors, and I want to share a small segment of his 1992 The Art of Fiction interview in The Paris Review. His interview reads so similarly to his books—he had a fantastical way of writing and speaking. Now, I’m attached to the idea of being delirious and thinking about the architecture of a piece of work while writing.
Invite your friends to read Absolument ! and receive a “paid” subscription for free.
When you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any of my posts, you'll get credit for any new subscribers. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.
3 friend referrals gets you 1 month free access to all posts
6 friend referrals gets you 3 months free access to all posts
25 friend referrals gets you half of a year free access to all posts
Poppy Jones
I discovered Poppy Jones’s oil and watercolor paintings (on suede!) through
’s Four Artists to Have Your Eye On. I had never thought to paint on suede and now I have to give it a try.
Other Notes:
Annie Ernaux’s text, Exteriors, inspired photography curator Lou Stoppard to gather a collection of pictures by 150 photographers for display at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris last May. Ernaux wrote:
“I believe that desire, frustration and social and cultural inequality are reflected in the way we examine the contents of our shopping trolley or in the words we use to order a cut of beef or to pay tribute to a painting … That the violence and shame inherent in society can be found in the contempt a customer shows for a cashier or in the vagrant begging for money who is shunned by his peers—in anything that appears to be unimportant and meaningless simply because it is familiar or ordinary.”
Images from the exhibition Exteriors: Annie Ernaux and Photography, MEP, 2024. Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge was an exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice that ended a couple of weeks before I honeymooned there. The sadness in missing this show!! Thankfully, the internet can provide us a nice glimpse of the exhibition:
Garry Fabian Miller’s The Color Field, Red gently embraces soft Yellow (2021) makes me feel like I’ve briefly caught myself in an Josef Albers-adjacent trance.
One of my earliest Substack writings from a year and a half ago, coming to life again:
Gio Ponti’s “Graceful Butterfly" Villa Planchart—and Ponti imagery soup.
·
“I want to dip my eyes into Gio Ponti imagery soup for the rest of my days,” I told someone dear to me after attempting to describe how meaningful this Italian designer’s oeuvre seemed. This phrase remains my only way of properly summarizing how I feel about Gio Ponti, and I think showing photographs of his Villa Planchart design will help illustrate my point. Quickly, you’ll be asking if your eyes can be an ingredient in his special soup too.
**
What does your imaginary (or real) heartbreak home look like?
Kelsey Rose
I’m literally in a class right now, so I can’t read this essay yet, but oh my god, the cover art. So so good.
Me now looking for Venetian glass chandeliers