Im Not a Thing Not a Work of Art to Be Cherished
One particularly icy winter twenty-four hour period not too long agone, I reluctantly retired my cycle, took the subway into Manhattan, and gave up my seat to a kindly adult female a few decades my senior. We struck up a conversation — an occurrence doubly delightful for its distressing rarity on the New York City subway. For this radical human action we were rewarded with an instant kinship of spirit — she turned out to be the wonderful creative person Sheila Pinkel, visiting from the West Coast for a show she was having at a New York gallery, and we bonded over our mutual love of Henry Miller (Dec 26, 1891–June 7, 1980), lamenting how much of his magnificent and timeless writing has perished out of impress — things like his beautiful reflections on the greatest souvenir of growing old and on money and on the meaning of life.
Right before I hopped out at my stop, Sheila mentioned 1 particular book that had made a strong impression early in life, but which she had been unable to find since — Miller's 1968 lost gem To Paint Is to Love Once again (public library). Naturally, I tracked downwards a surviving copy as shortly as possible and was instantly enchanted by this rare and wonderful treasure trove of Miller's paintings — for he was among the famous writers who were drawn to the visual arts, producing such lesser-known treats as J.R.R. Tolkien's illustrations, Sylvia Plath's drawings, William Faulkner's Jazz Age etchings, Flannery O'Connor'southward cartoons, Zelda Fitzgerald'south watercolors, and Nabokov's butterfly studies — enveloped in his devastatingly honest and insightful words on art, sincerity, kindness, hardship, and the gift of friendship.
With his characteristic blend of irreverence, earnestness, and unapologetic wisdom, Miller — who began painting at the age of thirty-seven in 1928, while he was "supposed to exist at piece of work on the great American novel" only was yet to publish anything at all, bought his outset watercolors and brushes in the midst of poverty, and was soon painting "morning, apex and night" — explores the eternal question of what art is and what makes one an creative person.
Somewhere between the great scientist as a master at the art of ascertainment and the writer, whom Susan Sontag memorably defined equally "a professional observer," Miller places the painter:
What is more than intriguing than a spot on the bathroom flooring which, as you sit elimination your bowels, assumes a hundred unlike forms, figures, shapes? Often I found myself on my knees studying a stain on the floor — studying information technology to detect all that was hidden at first sight. No dubiety the painter, studying the face of the sitter whose portrait he is nearly to do, must be astonished by the things he suddenly recognizes in the familiar visage earlier him. Looking attentively at an center or a pair of lips, or an ear — particularly an ear, that weird appendage! — one is astounded by the metamorphoses a homo countenance undergoes. What is an eye or an ear? The anatomy books will tell you i affair, or many things, but looking at an eye or ear to render it in course, texture, colour yields quite some other kind of noesis. Suddenly yous encounter — and information technology'due south not an center or an ear only a little universe composed of the most extraordinary elements having nothing to do with sight or hearing, with flesh, os, musculus, cartilage.
In this fine art of seeing Miller finds the essential question of what a painting really is:
A flick… is a thousand different things to a thousand different people. Like a book, a piece of sculpture, or a poem. One movie speaks to you, another doesn't… Some pictures invite you to enter, so brand you a prisoner. Some pictures y'all race through, as if on roller skates. Some pb you out by the dorsum door. Some counterbalance you down, oppress yous for days and weeks on end. Others lift you up to the skies, brand y'all weep with joy or gnash your teeth in despair.
But in contemplating this spectrum of the viewer'due south emotional experience, Miller counters Tolstoy'southward thought of "emotional infectiousness" between artist and audience and writes:
What happens to you when you expect at a painting may not exist at all what the artist who painted it intended to have happen. Millions of people have stood and gazed in open-mouthed wonder at the Mona Lisa. Does anyone know what was going on in Da Vinci's mind when he did it? If he were to come to life again and look at information technology with his ain two eyes it is dubious, in my mind, that he would know himself precisely what it was that fabricated him present her in this immortal fashion.
And nevertheless the intensity of the creative person'south own emotion, Miller argues, is the truthful lifeblood of art and of optimism virtually the human spirit:
To paint is to love again. It's only when we wait with optics of love that we see as the painter sees. His is a beloved, moreover, which is free of possessiveness. What the painter sees he is duty-leap to share. Usually he makes us see and feel what normally we ignore or are immune to. His manner of approaching the world tells us, in consequence, that zilch is vile or hideous, nothing is dried, apartment and unpalatable unless it be our own power of vision. To run into is not merely to look. One must look-see. Run into into and around.
He recounts the profound transformation he witnessed within himself when he "offset began to view the world with the eyes of a painter" and learned a whole new style of paying attending — a style that lives upward to Mary Oliver's cute exclamation that attention without feeling … is only a study." Miller writes:
The most familiar things, objects which I had gazed at all my life, now became an unending source of wonder, and with the wonder, of grade, amore. A tea pot, an old hammer, or chipped loving cup, whatever came to paw I looked upon every bit if I had never seen it before. I hadn't, of course. Exercise non most of usa get through life blind, deaf, insensitive? Now equally I studied the object'south physiognomy, its texture, its way of speaking, I entered into its life, its history, its purpose, its clan with other objects, all of which but endeared information technology the more than… Accept you ever noticed that the stones ane gathers at the beach are grateful when we concord them in our hands and cuddle them? Do they not take on a new expression? An one-time pot loves to be rubbed with tenderness and appreciation. So with an axe: kept in good condition, information technology always serves its master lovingly.
Dissimilar his longtime lover and lifelong friend Anaïs Nin, who believed that "if 1 changes internally, ane should not continue to live with the same objects," Miller extols the gladdening balls of the old:
I have always cherished old things, used things, things marked by the passage of time and human events. I recollect of my own self this way, every bit something much handled, much knocked about, every bit worn and polished with use and corruption. As something serviceable, perhaps I should say. More serviceable for having had so many masters, so many wretched, glorious, haphazard experiences and encounters. Which explains, maybe, why it is that when I start to practise a head it always turns into a "self-portrait." Even when it becomes a woman, fifty-fifty when it bears no resemblance to me at all. I know myself, my changing faces, my ineradicable Stone Age expression. It's what happened to me that interests me, not resemblances. I am a worn, used creature, an object that loves to be handled, rubbed, caressed, stuffed in a coat pocket, or left to bake in the sun. Something to be used or not used, every bit you similar.
Noting that he never dares to call himself a painter and yet he does pigment, Miller considers the psychology backside this ambivalent attitude — something at the center of Ann Truitt's insightful meditation on the difference between "doing fine art" and being an artist — and writes:
I turn to painting when I can no longer write. Painting refreshes and restores me; information technology enables me to forget that I am temporarily unable to write. And then I paint while the reservoir replenishes itself.
This, of course, is a strategy that many celebrated creators used — Madeleine L'Engle read science to enrich her writing and Einstein, who termed his artistic process "combinatory play,", is said to have come up upward with his greatest physics breakthroughs during his violin breaks. But it also makes sense nether more formal psychological models of how creativity works, all of which crave some form of incubation flow, or what Alexander Graham Bell called "unconscious cerebration" — a stage during which "no effort of a direct nature" is fabricated toward 1's creative goal and the mind is instead allowed to perform its essential background processing.
This notion comes very much alive in Miller'southward account of those early days when he offset became besotted with painting and its singular fashion of seeing the world:
Though my mind was intensely active, for I was seeing everything in a new low-cal, the impression I had was of painting with some other part of my existence. My mind went on humming, similar a cycle that continues to spin after the manus has allow get, just it didn't become frazzled and exhausted as it would afterwards a few hours of writing. While I played, for I never looked on it every bit piece of work, I whistled, hummed, danced on 1 foot, then the other, and talked to myself.
[…]
Information technology was a joy to keep turning [paintings] out like a madman — maybe considering I didn't have to bear witness anything, either to the earth or to myself. I wasn't hepped on becoming a painter. Not at all. I was simply wiggling out of the strait-jacket.
He draws a further contrast between painting and writing in their respective effects on the creator'south psyche:
I enjoy talking to painters more than than to writers… Painters requite me the impression of being less used upwardly past their daily task than writers or musicians. Also, they use words in a more plastic mode, as if conscious of their very substantial originals. When they write … they reveal a poetic touch which writers frequently lack. Perchance this is due to living continuously with flesh, textures, objects, and non only with ideas, abstractions, complexes. Often they are mimes or story tellers, and nearly always good cooks. The writer, on the other hand, is and then often pale, awkward, incompetent in everything except the business concern of putting words together.
The disposition of the painter and the writer, Miller observes with the warm wryness of someone very much aware that he is kickoff a writer, differs not only in their psychic state during cosmos but also in how each relates to their finished piece of work:
To pigment is to love over again, live again, run across once more. To get up at the crack of dawn in order to accept a peek at the water colors one did the 24-hour interval before, or even a few hours before, is like stealing a look at the love while she sleeps. The thrill is even greater if ane has first to draw back the curtains. How they glow in the common cold lite of early dawn! … Is there any author who rouses himself at daybreak in gild to read the pages of his manuscript? Perish the thought!
And yet Miller notes that many historic writers were also "painters, musicians, actors, ambassadors, mathematicians," of which he observes:
When ane is an artist all mediums open up… Every creative person worth his table salt has his [hobby]. It'south the norm, not the exception.
For Miller, part of the attraction of painting lies in its superior, nearly primitive sincerity, of which only children and the rare developed artist are truthful masters — for the same reason that children accept a wealth to teach u.s. about take chances, failure, and growth. Miller writes:
For me the paintings of children vest side by side with the works of the masters… The piece of work of a kid never fails to make appeal, to claim us, considering it is always honest and sincere, always imbued with the magic certitude built-in of the straight, spontaneous approach.
[…]
Paul Klee … had the ability to render us to the world of the child also every bit to that of the poet, the mathematician, the alchemist, the seer. In the paintings of Paul Klee we are privileged to witness the miracle of the pedagogue slaying the pedagogue. He learned in club to forget, information technology would seem. He was a spiritual nomad endowed with the most sensitive palps… He almost never failed, and he never, never, never said too much.
Miller compares his own way of learning to that of children:
We all learn equally much as we wish to and no more. Nosotros acquire in different means, sometimes by not learning…. My manner is by trial and error, by groping, stumbling, questioning.
Noting that very few American painters excite him at all — amongst the exceptions he admiringly cites Georgia O'Keeffe and Jackson Pollock — Miller condemns the toxic issue of consumerism, something he had spiritedly condemned three decades earlier, on the creative spirit:
To paint is to love again, and to love is to alive to the fullest. But what kind of love, what sort of life tin can 1 hope to discover in a vacuum cluttered with every conceivable gadget, every conceivable money maker, every terminal comfort, every useless luxury? To live and love, and to give expression to information technology in pigment, one must besides be a truthful laic. In that location must be something to worship. Where in this broad land is the Holy of Holies subconscious?
[…]
The exercise of whatever fine art demands more than than mere savoir faire. One must non simply exist in love with what one does, i must also know how to make love. In honey self is obliterated. Only the beloved counts. Whether the love be a bowl of fruit, a pastoral scene, or the interior of a bawdy house makes no divergence. Ane must be in information technology and of it wholly. Earlier a discipline can be transmuted aesthetically it must be devoured and captivated. If information technology is a painting it must perspire with ecstasy.
Echoing Nietzsche'south confidence that a full life requires embracing rather than running from difficulty, he adds:
The lure of the chief lies in the struggle he engenders… [In America] for everything which taxes our patience, our skill, our understanding, we take short cuts… Only the art of honey, it would seem, all the same defies the brusk cutting.
Decades before Lewis Hyde's now-legendary manifesto for the souvenir economy and half a century before its modernistic-day counterpart, Amanda Palmer's manifesto for the art of asking, Miller writes:
Certainly the surest way to kill an artist is to supply him with everything he needs. Materially he needs but little. What he never gets enough of is appreciation, encouragement, understanding. I accept seen painters give away their nigh cherished work on the impulse of the moment, sometimes in return for a good meal, sometimes for a fleck of honey, sometimes for no reason at all — simply considering it pleased them to do then. And I have seen these same men refuse to sell a cherished painting no matter what the sum offered. I believe that a true artist always prefers to give his work abroad rather than sell information technology. A good artist must as well have a streak of insanity in him, if by insanity is meant an exaggerated inability to adapt. The private who tin can arrange to this mad world of to-day is either a nobody or a sage. In the one example he is allowed to art and in the other he is across information technology.
Miller traces this purity of intention back to 1 of his kickoff mentors and greatest influences, the painter Lilik Schatz, who never condemned Miller'southward lack of technique in painting but had no tolerance for "lack of feeling, lack of daring." Miller quotes Schatz's memorable advice:
Exercise annihilation you like, only do it with conviction!
For their sincerity and integrity of conviction, Miller held painters in high regard his whole life. He describes them as "all lovable souls, and some … possessed of a wisdom altogether uncommon." Even though these impressions were based on Miller's friendships with a number of prominent artists, including Man Ray and Beauford Delaney, he remains most moved by the peachy photographer Alfred Stieglitz, a man of "vigorous, youthful spirit" and "unique manner of looking at things":
No one had ever talked painting to me the way Stieglitz did. It wasn't his talk alone either, but the look in his optics which accompanied it. That he was non a painter amazed me…. If ever the creative person had a friend, a spokesman, a champion defender, information technology was in the person of Alfred Stieglitz… He was 1 of the very few Americans … whose approach to a work of art inspired reverence for the artist, for his work, for fine art itself. Lucky for united states of america who come nether his spell that he was not a painter, that he had created for himself the role of interpreter and defender.
Miller's deep appreciation for such champions of the creative person echoes, coincidentally, what Georgia O'Keeffe — the love of Stieglitz's life, and a legendary artist whose ain career was sparked by a friend's unflinching faith — once wrote of the only truthful measure of success in art. In a sentiment that Robert Krulwich would come to echo half a century subsequently in his magnificent first address on the importance of "friends in low places," Miller extols the enormous spiritual value of such supporters:
Usually the artist has two life-long companions, neither of his own choosing… — poverty and loneliness. To have a friend who understands and appreciates your work, 1 who never lets you down but who becomes more than devoted, more than reverent, as the years go by, that is a rare experience. It takes but one friend, if he is a man of faith, to work miracles.
But Miller'due south timeliest point is his word of advice and admonition to young artists, heeding which is doubly important in our networked and networking age preoccupied with how big an artist's Twitter following is or how "successful" her Kickstarter campaign:
How pitiful information technology is to hear young painters talking about dealers, shows, newspaper reviews, rich patrons, so on. All that comes with time — or will never come. But first one must brand friends, create them through one'southward work. What sustains the creative person is the expect of honey in the eyes of the beholder. Not money, non the right connections, not exhibitions, not flattering reviews.
Miller intuits with great poetic precision what we at present know empirically about grit being more important than "genius":
To win through by sheer force of genius is one thing; to survive and go on to create when every last door is slammed in one's confront is another. Nobody acquires genius — information technology is God-given. But one can acquire patience, fortitude, wisdom, understanding. Perhaps the greatest gift [is] to love what one does whether it causes a stir or not.
In withal another stroke of prescience, Miller reveals himself as an early proponent of the pay-what-you-wish model of funding creative endeavor — the model that makes Brain Pickings possible — and adds:
Who knows what is good for man in this life? Poverty is i of the misfortunes people seem to dread even more than sickness… Just is it so dreadful? For me this seemingly bleak period was a virtually instructive 1, because not existence able to write for money I had to turn to something else to keep going. It could take been shining shoes; it happened to be water colors. To make water colors for money never gave me the least qualm. I prepare no price on my labors. Whatsoever the buyer chose to offer, whatever he thought he could beget, no thing how ridiculous the sum, I said yes… I earned but enough to keep my head higher up water. Information technology was like writing songs and getting paid to whistle them.
Having written about the cute osmosis of giving and receiving nearly iii decades earlier, Miller closes with a wonderfully touching personal anecdote — the kind constitute in Charles Bukowski's beautiful letter of gratitude to his first patron. Illustrating the mutually ennobling effects of this kindness economy, Miller recounts one such early friendly spirit to whom he owes his creative destiny:
All this practiced fortune — of being able to piece of work like a canis familiaris in happy poverty — was the issue of a hazard encounter with Attilio Bowinkel who ran an art shop in Westwood Village. One 24-hour interval I entered his shop to buy two tubes of paint. I asked for the cheapest water colors he had. When he asked me if that was all I needed I told him frankly that that was all I could afford at the moment. Whereupon the skilful Mr. Bowinkel put me a few discreet but pertinent queries. I answered briefly and truthfully. Then he said, and I shall never forget it: "Cull what you like … newspaper, paints, brushes, whatsoever y'all need. Information technology'due south a souvenir." A few days later he came to the Light-green House to inspect my work. I blushed when I showed him what I had on paw. He didn't say whether they were practiced or bad only on leaving he took a few with him, and the next twenty-four hour period, on passing his shop, I noticed two of them in the window, beautifully framed. They were sold that very day, to Arthur Freed of M.K.M., a collector of modern European paintings… In Attilio Bowinkel I institute a friend and a saviour.
To Paint Is to Love Again is difficult to notice simply well worth the attempt — information technology is indeed the kind of book that might one twenty-four hours possess you lot to practise something equally crazy as telling a stranger on the New York subway about it. Complement it with Miller on the art of living, the secret to remaining young at middle, the greatest thing about the universe, and his eleven commandments of writing.
Source: https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/01/21/to-paint-is-to-love-again-henry-miller/
0 Response to "Im Not a Thing Not a Work of Art to Be Cherished"
Post a Comment