pamela's list

1. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
2. "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" by Jorge Luis Borges
3. A History of Colors by Manlio Brusatin
4. if on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
5. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Karen Kilimnik Possessed, NYTimes Style Section

Karen Kilimnik, Possessed, NYTimes Style Section, January 20, 2008

THE world is a complicated place. So perhaps it is fitting that we should conjure a pointedly optimistic way of thinking just to dispel the voices of certain doom and jaded irony. The first says, “It can’t be done”; the second says, “It has been done to death.”

Proponents of blue-sky thinking often cite the Wright brothers as validation. But why not the artist Karen Kilimnik? Like an all-too-human version of Giselle, the blithe princess in “Enchanted,” Ms. Kilimnik has expressed her brand of blue-sky thinking, most recently with a show, at 303 Gallery in Chelsea, of small paintings of, yes, blue skies. Some are even circular, suggesting the bowl of heaven. And though there are a few cirrus-y wisps wafting across her skies, they are, like all of her paintings, free of irony.

It is hard to believe that Ms. Kilimnik is sincere in a world ruled by archness and artifice, but there it is. The woman loves a forest, loves Kate Moss, loves an Alpine landscape, loves a blue sky, and her paintings say so. It’s kind of conceptual minimalism.

“I don’t know why, I just like it,” she said last week. She was talking about one of her favorite things: a bottle of Penhaligon’s Bluebell perfume. But Ms. Kilimnik, who is notoriously shy, could have been explaining the reasoning behind any of the myriad subjects she has painted, or articulating an entire aesthetic manifesto.

In the case of Bluebell, at least, the reasons can be documented. In the 1970s, when Ms. Kilimnik was a struggling artist, she saw the flowery British perfume at Saks Fifth Avenue. “I couldn’t afford it,” she said, recalling how the old-fashioned packaging and English heritage tugged at her heartstrings.

“I always loved England,” said Ms. Kilimnik, whose Anglophilia was practiced at great distance, from her childhood in Philadelphia. “I liked the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Sherlock Holmes and Mary Poppins and ‘The Avengers.’ But mostly the Beatles.”

Over the years she also developed a soft spot for British royalty, especially Prince Charles and Diana, who, as luck would have it, was herself an ardent fan of Bluebell — at least, according to Penhaligon’s, which holds the royal warrant. “I read all the books about her, and none of them ever mentioned Bluebell,” Ms. Kilimnik said suspiciously.

By late 1998 Ms. Kilimnik had become enough of a success to go to London in style on an art fellowship. There, in a pharmacy, she came face to face with her old flame.

“I thought, I shouldn’t spend all that,” she said. “I had never bought a real perfume for myself.” But spend all that she did. (Today a 100-milliliter bottle is $90.) One might think that the perfume reminds her of this glorious moment, of having arrived professionally, and in London no less, but Ms. Kilimnik said no.

“I love the apothecary shape of the bottle,” she said. “I love the label, which is so old-fashioned, and I love the royal warrants. But primarily I just love the smell. It’s very pure and essential. It smells like fresh-cut grass.”

The perfume is stored in Ms. Kilimnik’s refrigerator; she’s not taking any chances with its going bad. “Although it didn’t stop the last bottle from turning green after a while,” she said.

More than a sweet aroma, though, the perfume distills rather nicely the genius of Ms. Kilimnik’s blue-skied world. In a culture where you open yourself up to ridicule for liking anything — headbands, Kelly Clarkson, Los Angeles — unless you’re doing it ironically, Ms. Kilimnik has tapped into the sweet smell of her own world, and her own creation.

And if you don’t like it, well, why don’t you try?