Category Archives: art

one thing leads to another

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IMG_2085

Which leads to another….

For the last post, I was looking for a quote by Henri Matisse that I never found by the way about not needing to show the whole shape of something in order for the viewer to grasp what you’re creating. In fact, for the Barnes Foundation mural, Matisse intentionally showed only part of the dance so that the viewer would follow the painting off the page. All of which I wish I’d put in the last post…Anyway I found myself flipping through my favorite book on Matisse, Matisse on Art by Jack Flam,  and rereading all my underlinings.

IMG_2078Then came some interest in an older post of mine on a quote by Flannery O’Connor from The Habit of Being:  The Letters of Flannery O’Connor: “…I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.”

So I noticed that an interviewer, in the summer of 1931, noticed that Matisse was “looking for a way to summarize again what he had been saying…I had to smile when I realized that he was striving for order in his conversation just as in his paintings.”  I love that Matisse did that. I do it all the time.

Is that all? No, there’s more.

Anyway anyway, in the comments to that older post, we’ve been discussing that Frank Conroy “used to say that in his own writing he’d read and re-read what he’d written the day before until he knew what to do next.”

IMG_2082Matisse also said, “…I continually react until my work comes into harmony with me. As someone who writes a sentence, reworks it, makes new discoveries…At each stage, I reach a balance, a conclusion. At the next sitting, if I find that there is a weakness in the whole, I make my way back into the picture by means of the weakness–I re-enter through the breach–and I reconceive the whole. Thus everything becomes fluid again…At the final stage the painter finds himself freed and his emotion exists complete in his work. He himself, in any case, is relieved of it.”

Which is the way I find that I’m writing these days.

Now I’m relieved of this little trail.

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the odd shapes of life

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IMG_1675“Obituaries, I believe, are really less about death than the odd shapes life takes, the patterns that death allows us to see.”

The Bridge of Sighs, Richard Russo

But it’s not death that allows us to see the patterns. Death just gives us the last few strokes, allows us to write the last few sentences.

It’s the writing that allows us to see–the process of writing and the finished product.

We don’t need to know the shape or pattern before we start. Henri Matisse wrote, “…I am driven by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture.” The same is true of writing.

Writing is the brush with which writers make shapes. One of the things that makes writing so exciting is the discoveries we make as we write.

For those afraid to start, Matisse wrote, “…each new stroke diminishes the importance of the preceding ones.”

So let’s write and let the shapes emerge…

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breathing in art

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img_11781Reading Willa Cather‘s The Song of the Lark is like breathing in art, instead of air.  It’s in the words chosen by the author, in Thea’s artistic pursuit of her voice (a lark, of course, known for its beautiful songs), and in Thea’s love of the painting, ”The Song of the Lark,” by French painter Jules Breton.  Here on the cover, it was painted in 1884, and now hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, perhaps since 1894.  The book was published in 1915. 

Thea describes the painting:

“But in that same room there was a picture–oh, that was the thing she ran upstairs so fast to see!  That was her picture…She liked even the name of it, “The Song of the Lark.”  The flat country, the early morning light, the wet fields, the look in the girl’s heavy face–well, they were all hers, anyhow, whatever was there.  She told herself that that picture was ‘right.’  Just what she meant by this, it would take a clever person to explain.  But to her the word covered the almost boundless satisfaction she felt when she looked at the picture.”

Toward the end of the novel, Thea says:  “I had lived a long, eventful life, and an artist’s life, every hour of it.  Wagner says, in his most beautiful opera, that art is only a way of remembering youth.  And the older we grow the more precious it seems to us, and the more richly we can present that memory.”

When the novel opens, Thea is eleven.  We meet her first as a child.  Late in the book, she says, “A child’s attitude toward everything is an artist’s attitude.”  Henri Matisse, years later, emphasizes this point in his famous essay, “Looking at Life with the Eyes of a Child.”  The artist, he writes, must look at everything “as though he were seeing it for the first time:  he has to look at life as he did when he was a child.”

Thea says, “They save me: the old things, things like the Kohlers’ garden.  They are in everything I do.”  It’s her being able to reach them, inside herself , that allows her to come into the fullness of her voice.