The Suicides of Artists Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan.

Jeremy Blake was a video artist and an American painter known for his innovations in merging and expanding the meaning and conceptions of painting with digital technology into video installations, DVDs, C-prints, and collaborative film projects. His work was featured on Beck's "Seachange" album cover as well as in Paul Thomas Anderson's film, "Punch Drunk Love".

Theresa Duncan was best known as the editor of a literary magazine. She was also a filmmaker and pioneering video game artist. The blogs she posted on her site called The Wit of the Staircase has given us insite into perhaps her most intimate title of cultural critic.

On July 10, 2007, Jeremy Blake, a rising art star, returned to his apartment, a converted rectory at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery that he shared with his girlfriend, Theresa Duncan. The couple, still very much in love after 12 years, had eaten a late lunch together. After parting for a few hours, Blake returned, having invited the church's assistant pastor over for a drink. That was when Blake found Duncan on their bedroom floor. A brief suicide note indicated that she loved him and was at peace with her decision.

Before swallowing a number of Tylenol PM tablets with bourbon, Theresa Duncan updated her blog with a benign quote from the novelist Reynolds Price: "A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence ..."

A week after her funeral, Blake took his own life as well. He was last seen at Rockaway Beach in N.Y., stripping down to his shorts and walking into the Atlantic Ocean. Found in his pants pocket was a suicide note referencing Theresa.

From the title page of Duncan's blog, The Wit of the Staircase, she writes:

From the French phrase 'esprit d'escalier,' literally, it means 'the wit of the staircase', and usually refers to the perfect witty response you think up after the conversation or argument is ended. "Esprit d'escalier," she replied. "Esprit d'escalier. The answer you cannot make, the pattern you cannot complete till afterwards, it suddenly comes to you when it is too late."

Trying to suppress something doesn't make it untrue. Questions are left unanswered and so it goes. It seems that artists such as these are somehow too pure for the harshness of the world. Many, whether entitled or not, have written articles relating to their suicides. The level of difficulty in which most have had while trying to answer the inevitable question, "why did they do it?" bears the impact of the couples complexity and brilliance. Not having known either of them, it would be hard to capture the sublimity of the lives and deaths of Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan. However, it is in my humble opinion that New York Magazine has captured the story in the most fair and honest way. The article can be viewed by clicking on this link: Conspiracy of Two

Yours Truly, xoxo Liz