It's Your Job

From Spending by Mary Gordon, page 277

"The moment you finish a painting is the death of hope. The death of possibilities. You've sent it out into the world. . . .

". . . If you don't saturate the canvas with everything you saw, if you haven't used all your skill to create that impossible congruence of form and vision, then it simply won't be in the world. It's possible not to care about that, to say that the world doesn't need your vision, that there's more than enough expression, God knows, even about beauty, in the world already. But if, through some accident, you feel the urgency of making that connection between your vision and its form, if you feel that, however superfluous a job it is, it's your job, you simply have to do it as well as you can, attending to every line and surface, and then to the way they all relate. You absorb your inevitable sense of failure. And then you say: it's finished. There's nothing more for me to do."

Two Books

While I was on vacation last week I read two books, novels, about the art world.

The first one, Spending by Mary Gordon, is about a woman artist who is a respectfully successful painter in NYC. She meets a man who offers to be her muse. He is rich and pays for everything. He replaces her salary from her teaching job at a girls school so she can quit and give all her time to her painting. He buys her an apartment with lots of windows, a terrific view and great light where she can paint and he lets her use his summer home in Cape Cod as her own. He only uses it when she allows him to come there. If she needs to go to Rome to see paintings in museums, they go. Whatever she needs to do to create her paintings he gives her.

I'm not writing a book review by any means. I'm enjoying the fantasy. What if? How luscious.

The second book was The Art Fair by David Lipsky. This is about a woman artist, a mother of two young sons, who breaks into the New York art scene and is adored by her gallery owner because her sales are off the charts only to be dropped when her personal life interferes with the creation of her paintings. It's a twenty year climb for her to get back into the acceptance of her once adoring gallery owner's graces. The book is partly autobiographical as the story is based on the author's artist mother's experience.

While this book didn't have the fun flair of "what if," it did have the example of perseverance and tenacity it takes to keep pounding the pavement and sending out slides. The mother artist in this story always kept producing work and kept pushing to improve year after year. I was really taken with that. While the story was full of sizing up the art world and how to behave to certain people in this made up art scene, it did make the point of her single mindedness in always improving, always asking herself how she could make her paintings better and then making her paintings better.

Both books offered the light, relaxing vacation reading that I was looking for. And when I got home, there was an acceptance in the mail to an art exhibit I really, really wanted to get in. It was a great vacation.

Quote

Life is pure adventure and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art.
-- Maya Angelou