I had planned a style post for today and we were going to have a little photo shoot by the sea in the morning, on the stony beach of Toila. But J had twisted his ankle quite badly, so instead of posing in the sun, I spent the first half of the day in the ER in Kohtla-Järve – a town that I think can be fairly described as unglamorous.

While there, I was frantically thinking what I could conceivably write about that would not require too much time or new photos. I realized that I hadn’t done an inspiration post for a while and that it was high time to write about something slightly more intellectual than the different hues of khaki. I was going through the things I had read recently, but for some reason, my mind kept returning to an article in The New Yorker, about artists Margaret Kilgallen, Clare Rojas and Barry McGee.

It is a somewhat hazy and slightly unsettling article of the type you don’t see much these days – long, well researched, atmospheric, about people that aren’t seriously famous. It’s possibly only The New Yorker that can afford things like that now. As my knowledge of modern American art is sketchy at best, I had not heard of the Mission School, let alone any artists under this umbrella. Despite her being dead, Kilgallen takes over the article and no wonder – talented, fierce and dead by 33, it’s difficult not to be interested. Her work may not be to everyone’s taste, but I find her voice (or her line?) very convincing.

She was also extremely cool in that indie kind of way that many today’s It-girls would sell a couple of organs for. A good banjo player, a surfer, a graffiti artist under the name of Matokie Slaughter, sincerely interested in handicrafts and hand-painted signs – who doesn’t want to be a person like that? She also had a style signature: on every picture I’ve found of her, she has one bobby pin holding back her curly red hair. And just like that, I had found my hair grip muse. Next time I feel that simply pinning back my hair is a miserable defeat in the hair game, I’ll think of Margaret Kilgallen. If it was cool enough for her, it’s certainly cool enough for me.

PS I stole the pictures from the Internet, but I’m not getting rich thanks to them, I promise.