Hello, listeners. Welcome to Advanced Studio Classroom. My name is Peter, and you are joining us today, December 6, 2025, for day two of our inspiration article for the month of December in your trusty Advanced magazine.

The article is called “Drawing Inspiration from Matisse: Learning How to Live a Second Life from the Famous Artist.” And the artist, of course, Matisse, Henri Matisse, a painter of the 20th century and the late 19th century, often mentioned in the same breath as the great Pablo Picasso, with whom he was friends as well as rivals.

That is to say, they had a sort of competitive nature between the two of them, trying to outdo each other with their art. But Picasso once referred to Matisse as a magician, which is high praise indeed.

But the author of our article is a gentleman who underwent radical spine cancer surgery about 10 years ago. And in recovering from that, he lost the use of his legs, or at least they were partially paralyzed.

And this was difficult for him because he had always been a very active person. He had not been a painter himself, but he had been very physically active, and now he could no longer do that.

So we read yesterday about how he initially drew comfort and inspiration and support from stories of athletes who had overcome physical handicaps like he had to continue to do their thing: mountain bikers, climbers, marathoners.

But more recently, our author has said he’s drawn inspiration from Matisse, from this French painter, this great French painter who also had cancer surgery.

And after that surgery, he ended up producing some of the most important and amazing artwork of his entire career.

Matisse had this cancer surgery in his 70s and thought that he was probably at the end of his artistic career, just as he was nearly at the end of his biological life.

But instead, after the surgery, Matisse lived for another 13 years until he finally died. And he worked vigorously all that time, creating what is known as his cutouts, in which you take a piece of paper and you cut a shape out of that paper.

And that’s what Matisse did. Rather than using oils and paints on a canvas, he created these cutouts. And the author of the article was going to visit a display of these cutouts at a museum in New York City.

And so that is the ground we covered yesterday. We’ll continue today to learn more about the author’s experience of Matisse’s cutouts and how he drew inspiration from that to help in his own healing.

And when I say we, of course, I do mean myself and my co-panelist joining us from yesterday for her second day here. Please welcome back Linda. Hello, Linda. Hi, thank you. Hello, everyone. It’s great to be back.

And we are continuing then thinking about art, about the power of art. And Linda, I know that you’ve done a little painting here and there. You have a background in art.