We sat, the four of us, on a yellow sheet in the middle of Fort Tryon Park. The field was filled with people on their day off from work: a father and son playing baseball with a plastic bat, a toddler grasping fiercely to his mother's finger as he took a few steps, a couple with an actual picnic basket romantically eating squid on crackers.
"Look!" hissed my roommate, pointing to the road behind me. I turned my head and watched as a late middle aged man slowly walked by. His face was wrinkled and somewhat sad looking. His scraggly gray hair hung in streaks down the sides of his face. And in his arms, he carried one of the most beautiful paintings I had ever seen.
"Oh, I love Pointillism!" my roommate exclaimed, nearly jumping up in excitement. I did not know what Pointillism was. I assumed it meant the dotted way the painting was colored. Two trees stroked carefully and precisely in blends of pink and red stood on either side of a golden-colored road. Other pastels floated about in the background trees, as though the scene in the painting was a soft entryway into a magical fairyland, each dot a fairy come to help make up the picture.
The man with the painting passed by, and we returned to our picnic.
As the afternoon passed, it became time to go. We walked alongside the fortress wall of Fort Tryon Park, winding our way back towards the entrance. It was time to re-enter the world of cars, school, work, and responsibilities. Surrounding us was a brambling ensemble of shrubs, flowers, trees, and stone, with the bluish white sky shining overhead.
Suddenly, in the distance, we could see a man at an easel.
"It's the painter!"
We walked eagerly, yet cautiously, up to him. His painting was on an easel now and a paintbrush was in his hand. He had rested a few jars of paint on the fortress wall.
"Excuse me," one of our party suddenly spoke up. "We just wanted to let you know that we love your painting. You got us talking about Pointillism for about half an hour back there."
"Well, not quite half an hour."
"Is Pointillism common nowadays?"
"No, it's not very common," the man said. His voice was hardly a hoarse whisper, like it had not been used for a number of years and was trying to remember how to make sounds. "I'm glad you like my picture! I'm going to show all my pictures soon. This is my ninth one."
"Do you come here often?" I asked shyly.
"Every day," he answered, looking not at me but at the trees around him. "For about an hour or two. You see these trees here?" He pointed.
I looked where he was pointing and saw. There were the two trees from the painting, and where we were standing must be the road.
"How long have you been working on this painting for?" asked someone else.
"About four months now."
Four months!
We thanked the man and began an ascent up stone steps. As we walked, I thought - four months. Imagine working on a painting for four months and still not being finished.
Patience, I realized, really is a virtue. Because in order to have perseverance, one must have patience. And if one has patience, one can do things like paint one of the most beautiful paintings I have ever seen. If one has patience, one can really do anything in the world.
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Integrity
"What is it that I like so much about the house you're building for me, Howard?"
"A house can have integrity, just like a person," said Roark, "and just as seldom."
"In what way?"
"Well, look at it. Every piece of it is there because the house needs it -- and for no other reason. You see it from here as it is inside. The rooms in which you'll live made the shape. The relation of masses was determined by the distribution of space within. The ornament was determined by the method of construction, an emphasis of the principle that makes it stand. You can see each stress, each support that meets it. Your own eyes go through a structural process when you look at the house, you can follow each step, you see it rise, you know what made it and why it stands. But you've seen buildings with columns that support nothing, with purposeless cornices, with pilasters, mouldings, false arches, false windows. You've seen buildings that look as if they contained a single large hall, they have solid columns and single, solid windows six floors high. But you enter and find six stories inside. Or buildings that contain a single hall, but with a facade cut up into the floor lines, band courses, tiers of windows. Do you understand the difference? Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the other is in the audience."
"Do you know that that's what I've felt in a way? I've felt that when I move into this house, I'll have a new sort of existence, and even my simple daily routine will have a kind of honesty or dignity that I can't quite define. Don't be astonished if I tell you that I feel as if I'll have to live up to that house."
"I intended that," said Roark.
"And, incidentally, thank you for all the thought you seem to have taken about my comfort. There are so many things I notice that had never occured to me before, but you've planned them as if you knew all my needs. For instance, my study is the room I'll need most and you've given it the dominant spot -- and, incidentally, I see where you've made it the dominant mass from the outside, too. And then the way it connects with the library, and the living room well out of my way, and the guest rooms where I won't hear too much of them -- and all that. You were very considerate of me."
"You know," said Roark, "I haven't thought of you at all. I thought of the house." He added: "Perhaps that's why I knew how to be considerate of you."
This particular segment of the book is one which I feel speaks directly to me and my learning experiences this past year, so I am sharing it with you. It speaks volumes of truth to me. I hope it does to you, too.
"A house can have integrity, just like a person," said Roark, "and just as seldom."
"In what way?"
"Well, look at it. Every piece of it is there because the house needs it -- and for no other reason. You see it from here as it is inside. The rooms in which you'll live made the shape. The relation of masses was determined by the distribution of space within. The ornament was determined by the method of construction, an emphasis of the principle that makes it stand. You can see each stress, each support that meets it. Your own eyes go through a structural process when you look at the house, you can follow each step, you see it rise, you know what made it and why it stands. But you've seen buildings with columns that support nothing, with purposeless cornices, with pilasters, mouldings, false arches, false windows. You've seen buildings that look as if they contained a single large hall, they have solid columns and single, solid windows six floors high. But you enter and find six stories inside. Or buildings that contain a single hall, but with a facade cut up into the floor lines, band courses, tiers of windows. Do you understand the difference? Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the other is in the audience."
"Do you know that that's what I've felt in a way? I've felt that when I move into this house, I'll have a new sort of existence, and even my simple daily routine will have a kind of honesty or dignity that I can't quite define. Don't be astonished if I tell you that I feel as if I'll have to live up to that house."
"I intended that," said Roark.
"And, incidentally, thank you for all the thought you seem to have taken about my comfort. There are so many things I notice that had never occured to me before, but you've planned them as if you knew all my needs. For instance, my study is the room I'll need most and you've given it the dominant spot -- and, incidentally, I see where you've made it the dominant mass from the outside, too. And then the way it connects with the library, and the living room well out of my way, and the guest rooms where I won't hear too much of them -- and all that. You were very considerate of me."
"You know," said Roark, "I haven't thought of you at all. I thought of the house." He added: "Perhaps that's why I knew how to be considerate of you."
--The Fountainhead
---------------------------------------------------------
Last summer, I started reading The Fountainhead and felt very frustrated with it. I did not like either of the main characters, seeing them both as crazy extremes of the way one is to approach life. This summer, I am reading it again and I find it to be an interestingly, wonderfully different experience. It's amazing how much a person can change in a year. Even subtle changes can inspire drastic growths in one's outlook on the world.This particular segment of the book is one which I feel speaks directly to me and my learning experiences this past year, so I am sharing it with you. It speaks volumes of truth to me. I hope it does to you, too.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Sunday, March 9, 2008
A Defense of Art, Part 2, or More on the Trashy Novel Stuff
The Apple was so kind as to email me this article from the New York Times. Instead of providing a link, I just copied and pasted the whole thing, you if you want the link, it's here.
Great Literature? Depends Whodunit IN a British court recently, an author said, in effect, that glue-sniffing had made her write a thriller. The author, Joan Brady, is a 68-year-old American who has lived in England for the last several decades and in 1993 became the first woman to win the Whitbread book prize. She received a £115,000 out-of-court settlement after arguing that fumes from the glue and solvents used in the Conker shoe factory next door to her home in Totnes had poisoned the air and made her sick. She suffered nerve damage, she said, and a loss of concentration that caused her to abandon the literary novel she was working on, “Cool Wind From the Future,” and instead crank out a potboiler called “Bleedout.”
“Fumes Made Me Go Lowbrow, Says Writer” was the headline in The Times of London, and Ms. Brady took exception, claiming that the voice in the new book was exactly the same as the one she had used in her highbrow Whitbread winner. You have to wonder, though, how many literary novels have flap copy like this, from “Bleedout”: “Even after Hugh Freyl lost his sight he was invincible. But late one night, in the library of the elite law firm that bears his name, he was beaten to death.”
You also have to conclude that Conker or its lawyers don’t know much about the publishing business — that is, if they really believed that Ms. Brady had suffered from turning to thrillerdom. Thrillers by and large do much better than literary novels, and though the title “Bleedout” turns out to refer, disappointingly, to kosher butchery rather than human carnage, it has done pretty well, selling some 50,000 copies in Britain alone since it came out in 2005. An author seeking damages would do better, one would have thought, by claiming to have become so addled that she had decided to forsake a certain payday for the vain hope of literary success. In that case the Times headline might read: “Fumes Float Author’s Fantasy.”
But what’s behind the Brady controversy, of course, is the assumption that genre fiction — mysteries, thrillers, romances, horror stories — is a form of literary slumming. These kinds of books are easier to read, we tend to think, and so they must be easier to write, and to the degree that they’re entertaining, they can’t possibly be “serious.”
The distinction between highbrow and lowbrow — between genre writing and literary writing — is actually fairly recent. Dickens, as we’re always being reminded, wrote mysteries and horror stories, only no one thought to call them that. Jane Austen wrote chick lit. A whiff of shamefulness probably began attaching itself to certain kinds of fiction — and to mysteries and thrillers especially — at the end of the 19th century, with the rise of the “penny dreadful,” or cheaply printed serial. The market and public appetite for this stuff became even larger in the early years of the 20th century with the tremendous growth of pulp magazines, which specialized in the genres and eventually even added a new one: science fiction.
Pulp writing, amply on display in “The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps,” a new 1,000-page anthology edited by Otto Penzler, was often crude and formulaic, but it could also be thrillingly racy, taking on themes that politer fiction ignored, and eventually a few of the pulp writers — Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, for example — got promoted into the mainstream. The puzzling thing is that such promotions don’t happen more often. Both Ian Rankin, the British mystery writer, and Stephen King, the horror-meister, have complained about a double standard — a conspiracy, in effect — among critics and reviewers that tends to ghettoize genre writing and prevent its practitioners from being taken seriously.
But if there is a conspiracy it’s one that authors — highbrow authors, anyway — are sometimes complicit in, frequently adopting pseudonyms when they want to dabble in, say, crime writing. The most curious case recently is that of John Banville, the Booker Prize winner who has published two highly regarded mysteries under the name Benjamin Black but hasn’t taken any pains to keep his true identity a secret. For a Web site, he has even interviewed his alter ego. Perhaps not so surprising is that what makes the two Black novels, “Christine Falls” and “The Silver Swan,” so good — their atmospheric descriptive writing — is precisely Mr. Banville’s great strength, while Benjamin Black, whose third novel is currently being serialized in The New York Times Magazine, is still learning some of the ropes when it comes to plot and suspense.
The Black novels belong, in fact, to that interesting category of novels that are often said to “transcend” or “almost transcend” their genre. This compliment, however backhanded, used to be awarded all the time to John le Carré’s cold war thrillers. Mr. King hears it a lot now, especially from reviewers who want to imagine that he is gradually abandoning his horror roots. To transcend its genre, a book has to more nearly resemble a mainstream novel — it has to be less generic, in a word. A good example is the mysteries of P. D. James, justly praised for a characterization so rich and detailed that for long stretches you can forget you’re reading a crime story in the first place.
But is that always what we want — to forget why we’re reading what we’re reading? In a review a couple of years ago of a Robert Littell thriller, John Updike wrote about genre writers — Mr. le Carré and Ms. James included — who sometimes give signs of wanting to be “real” novelists and seem restive about living up to their implicit contract with the reader, which is to deliver on the promise that a particular genre entails — whether it’s a murder solved, a cold war plot thwarted, a horror unmasked, a love requited.
What we look for in genre writing, Mr. Updike suggested, is exactly what the critics sometimes complain about; the predictableness of a formula successfully executed. We know exactly what we’re going to get, and that’s a seductive part of the appeal. It’s why we can read genre books so quickly and in such quantity, and happily come back for more of the same by the very same author. Such books are reassuring in a way that some other novels are not.
Does that make them lesser, or just different? Probably both on occasion. But it doesn’t necessarily make them easier or less worthwhile to write. Henry James’s story “The Next Time” is a tragicomedy about Ralph Limbert, an author who desperately wants to be popular and write potboilers but can’t for the life of life of him manage, as the narrator says, to turn a silk purse into a sow’s ear. Like Ms. Brady, he even moves to the country, but without the benefit of fumes, he is doomed to being highbrow. The story is partly autobiographical, and not without a twinge of both snobbery and self-pity — James, too, wanted to be more popular than he was — but is also informed by a sense that for most writers there is no such thing as slumming. You write, by his lights, what you have a gift for writing; anything else will be revealed as fakery.
James talked a lot about “trash,” and whether he knew the difference between good trash and bad is doubtful. Yet he understood all about genre writing. “The Turn of the Screw,” one of the best things he ever wrote, is an unabashed ghost story.
Monday, March 3, 2008
A Defense of Art, Part 1
Yesterday, I went to see The Seagull by Chekov with my school. The general impression I got from that play was that art ruins your life, seeing as all the artists are miserable except for one really shallow person (who is also rather miserable, if you analyze her) and one ends up committing suicide.
After the play, we got to speak to the director and a bunch of the actors (including Alan Cumming - yay Scottish accent). I asked them about the message of the play and if there is a way to defend art based on that. The director said that art only ruins your life if you can't exist in art. Someone who is not willing to see art through for the sake of art, but more for the sake of themselves, will not make it. Only one whose true calling is art will survive.
I want to disagree. I want to disagree with the play as a whole, actually. Throughout the entire performance, we are never presented with a character who attempts it but is not good at art. I would have liked to have seen a talentless artist so I could see what that person's outcome would be. For me, the factor is not "can you exist without art in your life?" but rather "how much weight do you put on success?" If someone's true calling is not art but they decide to pursue some artistic endeavors anyway (such as acting, writing, etc.), that person can totally not let art get in the way of his happiness if his happiness is not dependent on the success of his art. In that respect, it's the exact opposite of what the director explained. Someone who puts the weight of his entire life and happiness on his art will never be satisfied. Then again, I suppose it depends why that person is creating art in the first place. If it is to please others, or worse, to please himself, he may never be satisfied, but if it is just to sell or just to create without concentrating so much on the end result, as in, doing it more for fun, then why should that ruin someone's life? Even if the person wants it to come out good, but creates art more to fulfill a desire of immersing himself in the art rather than anything else, I believe that person can still be perfectly happy.
Constantine's suicide is a result not of art, but of something much deeper. It is a reaction to his relationships and of the desire for acceptance from those who are distracted by other things. True, it is tied into art in that everyone else in the play is so preoccupied with one art form or another that they fail to see Constantine for who he is as a person and abandon him, but on the other hand, if that were not the case and Constantine were merely frustrated with his art, I don't believe he would have killed himself.
Basically, I'm frustrated with the play, with the message of the play, with the message of the director, and I am frustrated that I am coming down with a cold. Hmph.
After the play, we got to speak to the director and a bunch of the actors (including Alan Cumming - yay Scottish accent). I asked them about the message of the play and if there is a way to defend art based on that. The director said that art only ruins your life if you can't exist in art. Someone who is not willing to see art through for the sake of art, but more for the sake of themselves, will not make it. Only one whose true calling is art will survive.
I want to disagree. I want to disagree with the play as a whole, actually. Throughout the entire performance, we are never presented with a character who attempts it but is not good at art. I would have liked to have seen a talentless artist so I could see what that person's outcome would be. For me, the factor is not "can you exist without art in your life?" but rather "how much weight do you put on success?" If someone's true calling is not art but they decide to pursue some artistic endeavors anyway (such as acting, writing, etc.), that person can totally not let art get in the way of his happiness if his happiness is not dependent on the success of his art. In that respect, it's the exact opposite of what the director explained. Someone who puts the weight of his entire life and happiness on his art will never be satisfied. Then again, I suppose it depends why that person is creating art in the first place. If it is to please others, or worse, to please himself, he may never be satisfied, but if it is just to sell or just to create without concentrating so much on the end result, as in, doing it more for fun, then why should that ruin someone's life? Even if the person wants it to come out good, but creates art more to fulfill a desire of immersing himself in the art rather than anything else, I believe that person can still be perfectly happy.
Constantine's suicide is a result not of art, but of something much deeper. It is a reaction to his relationships and of the desire for acceptance from those who are distracted by other things. True, it is tied into art in that everyone else in the play is so preoccupied with one art form or another that they fail to see Constantine for who he is as a person and abandon him, but on the other hand, if that were not the case and Constantine were merely frustrated with his art, I don't believe he would have killed himself.
Basically, I'm frustrated with the play, with the message of the play, with the message of the director, and I am frustrated that I am coming down with a cold. Hmph.
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