4 June 2024
Marcel and Lydia came to lunch
It was thanks to reading both Marcel Proust and Lydia Davis over the past ten years that gave me complete permission to write with abandon, opening up without the fear of seeming pretentious, presumptous or foolish. Proust invited me into the comfy world of lengthy (and painterly) descriptions of Nature, Paris, and love interests. Lydia Davis, on the other hand, invited me to witness her autopsies she regularly performed on her characters, yet all still alive and writhing in pain. In contrast to gentle Proust, I like her sharp incisions through the skin of everyday life. She has a quick visual acuity that rivals Marcel (whom she also has translated). But where he takes a page or two for anything, she pares it down to a sentence; a telegram to a text, as it were.
Writing and Painting are sisters in many ways, but because both are vocations practiced in solitude they each need separate bedrooms And like Painting, writing is a tricky activity when done with a public in mind. But for me, both activities can only really be learned by just writing and painting a lot so I’ve discovered. Being an amateur, writing for oneself in a diary, rarely prepares anyone one for any reception in a wider world outside, but it does connect one to one’s interior, maybe even for the first time ever. It performs this mystical adventure by teaching one how to begin stringing sentences together with some assurance. Like with painting, only after much writing does one begin to feel confident that a small voice will rise up out of the mud to squeak like in a creature in a story by Dr Seuss.
Like Writing, Painting, as a full time activity, can also only be learned by failing a lot. But like most things in life, to fail teaches us how to fail less as we improve. We learn to take it on the chin; no blaming it on anyone else. Though schools are OK, I think both crafts are really taught by the masters, who have already attained greatness, not by teachers. Writers have to read and critically examine a lot of books, poetry, etc, etc, Painters have to look and critically examine lots of pictures. This has been my own education away from the failures of our desk and the studio.
Both of these crafts imply style because it’s essentially our creative personality that’s on display. But this, I think only arrives at our doorstep after some successes. How else could we become authentically us? I’m less sure about how style comes to a writer but if it’s like Painting then it poses problems for every student if we think it’s all that important. In either craft, it can ruin students who are obsessed with discovering it because actually, it just finds us. If it doesn’t then we should look for another outlet for our creativity.
An old friend of mine who has been very prolific in her life as a painter suddenly expressed this problem to me the other day. I was stunned to hear her say this because for me, she has always had a style which is natural and very recognisably personal to herself. She showed me some things from her web site. As it came out, what she really meant to say was that she wasn’t happy with her own style. This is altogether different. So we talked about that for a while. Sure, it can happen that an artist will periodically be dissatisfied with their work. That is something different. This question of Style is not that, but it is something which newcomers in many artistic fields do fret a lot about. When starting out, I struggled with lots of things but somehow I missed that bullet.
Many years ago, I read a book by the wonderful painter, and actor, Martin Mull, who attended Rhode Island School of Design back in the early 1970’s. In it he tells a funny story about one of his classmates in Freshman year who idolised Vincent Van Gogh. This fellow not only went around campus dressed up looking like Van Gogh, but in the studio, he was also trying to paint with Van Gogh’s explosive style much to the amusement of other classmates and teachers. One day, after complaining about not having his own style to the class, his teacher, asked him to paint a self-portrait as an exercise. When he returned the next week and showed it to the class, the teacher explained to the confused freshman that any and all ‘mistakes’ in the self-portrait were in fact, his very ‘own very personal style’. His ‘mistakes’ constituted his own way of using a brush with colours on a flat surface. I don’t remember what happenned to the other guy but this proved to be a valuable lesson to Mull, and needless to say, it would have been a great moment for all the students.
This study was the first of several a few evenings ago. I had barely started it when I decided to keep in its fresh unfinished state as a study. I saw something in it that I liked and that I wanted to make use of in the future, but maybe larger, and in the studio. It has that flat child-like feel to it that speaks to the kind of pictures I made myself as a child using water base paints. There is also some truth of the moment in it. Does it work graphically? is there light in it despite the somewhat impoverished colour? And yet, it created for me a kind of suspension bridge that went right backwards over the arc of time to me as a little kid playing around with paints.
So making these pictures over the past few years has alligned with my keeping the diary I’ve kept these past few decades. And this habit eventually taught me to express thoughts that at least at the time seemed authentic to me. When I discovered writers like Marcel Proust and Lydia Davis, I was encouraged enough to believe in my own indulgence, something I think is natural, almost paramount really, for any writer, or painter. Without it we wouldn’t be strong enough to preservere against all the failures lying ahead. My own diary, I’ve learned, was teaching me all about me about myself, quite unbeknownst to me. So when I look back on all those years of roaming museums everywhere and spending so much time with so many different artists from the Uffizi to the Met, page after page, concentrated on the likes of Titian and Goya, I finally understood that all that while, I was obsessing about the hat check girl at the entrance who took my overcoat.
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