BASQUIAT and FRIENDS. #amreading Jennifer Clement.

BASQUIAT

• He was attracted to people who silently bore some sort of inner pain. 
• His paintings are jazz on canvas.
• He doesn’t read books. He looks for the words that attack him and puts them on canvas.
• Looking at boxing gloves, he could feel thunderbolts in them.
• He was a barometer for the racist culture he lived in. He felt everything around him in a heightened way. It was not only cocaine paranoia.

RAMMELLZEE

• He walks in a bebop kind of slide.
• He looks for his shadow and crawls up inside it.

ANDY WARHOL

• Why does Andy need you, Suzanne asked Basquiat. I recharge his batteries, he said.
• Basquiat loved Andy because he loved to feel the power he had over Andy.

SUZANNE MALLOUK, BASQUIAT'S "WIDOW"

• Suzanne left home: Feel gray, must exit.
• Life can be a circle, not just a line.
• Afraid of testing positive for AIDS and promises God: If I’m negative, I’ll never do dope again. I’ll never sleep with strangers again…But she does not believe in God. And she breaks all her promises.
• Suzanne at Basquiat’s funeral: I thought if I covered my mouth, the knowledge of Jean’s death could not get outside of me.

(Source: Jennifer Clement, Baquiat’s Widow)