Guest Blogger Micra (Microlina on Tumblr) shares her first impressions of Richard Armitage. Micra’s native language is Italian ( or so she claims) and this is unedited.
I first saw Richard Armitage as Thorin, almost exactly one year ago. I didn’t know who the actor behind the prosthetic was, so I Googled for him. Since I have a tumblr, I searched for blogs about him and then looked for his previous works. I noticed a mini series about the Impressionist painters, that I love, so I decided to watch it. I don’t know anything about art, can’t draw to save my life, and I can’t critically judge a painting. My only criterion to evaluate a piece of art is emotion. If I am moved, find peace, burst into tears, deeply intrigued, then it’s art for me.
When I start watching the brief mini series I was thrilled to see how the arrangement of some object (fruit, people’s clothes, flowers in the very first scene with young Claude Monet arriving to Gleyre Academie ) with lights and colors, enhanced in the right way, could stand out from my screen to actually look like a painting.
Lights, colors. Impressions of life. To see some of the paintings I knew so well coming to life, the film images becoming the real painting, gave me shivers and made me cry.
My Screencap
So much beauty, with so much troubled lives. The incredible need Monet had to catch the light, to catch life in that precise instant on his canvas, to express what he felt in his soul won my mind and heart. Some weeks after this first viewing I knew much more things about Richard. I had seen many Hobbit press junket videos, read interviews, discovered everything I could about that giant “decent human being”, as Martin Freeman said of him during Tokyo Press Conference. Watching Richard performing as young Monet again I found myself thinking about young Richard that, as a teenager, decided he had a goal in his life. Dancing, performing, trying to express what he had inside of him.
My Screencap
Watching young Monet trying to catch the light made me think of Richard trying to catch Thorin, to find the character in himself, always experimenting, always trying to deliver a line better, a better gesture, a better fight scene. I was thinking about him driving early morning (to not bore anyone) reciting Shakespeare, the Maori speech, Russian Choir Songs to “find” Thorin voice. I see men driven by their muse, with their need to express their soul, gasping to be understood but not eager to become famous. Men that want to live with their art and ask only to pay the bills with it. I see something fine. I am moved by the determination of these men to remain true to themselves following a dream that is necessary to them as the life itself. A dream that, simply, is life.
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Armitage Agonistes 