Redtree Times

Winged Victory 1995

I like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end. We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life. I am by nature always beginning and believing and so I find your company more fruitful than that of, say, Edmund Wilson, who asserts his opinions, beliefs, and knowledge as the ultimate verity. Older people fall into rigid patterns. Curiosity, risk, exploration are forgotten by them. You have not yet discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself. It amazed me that you felt that each time you write a story you gave away one of your dreams and you felt the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love.

You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947

The excerpt above is from a letter Anaïs Nin wrote to a young aspiring writer to whom she was a mentor. I was at first struck mainly by its last line: …great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

That rang true to me. In my mind, art is how we deal with the wonder this world sets before us as well as its bafflement and frustrations. How we balance those things so we can find a modicum of peace of mind, enough to get on with life in a somewhat normal fashion, whatever that is.

That was the part of this passage that I was initially going to focus on today. There’s so much that can be said about how our experience and our perception of it shapes the art we make. But rereading the whole passage several times, I began to fixate on the last section of its first paragraph:

…the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself. It amazed me that you felt that each time you write a story you gave away one of your dreams and you felt the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love.

This hit me hard in a couple of ways. For one, in my early days as a painter, I used to think I was giving away a part of myself in each painting, that there was finite amount of myself that could be given. Take for instance, the painting at the top, Winged Victory, named so because the clouds in it reminded me of the famous statue of Nike. It was painted in the months after I had just started showing my work at the West End Gallery. When it was completed, I fell in love with it and was positive that it was the best thing I had ever painted to that point and might well be the best I would ever paint.

Foolish child.

I did show it at the West End but priced it at such a ludicrous price that nobody, even if it did appeal to them, would pay for a painting from an unknown with virtually no track record. I thought it would be a crime if someone had purchased it at the price my other work of similar size was garnering, that I would be giving away too big a piece of myself.

Again, foolish child.

I had not yet come to the realization that this giving of yourself in your work was much like the giving of love– we have an infinite capacity to give each. It expands to fill the need.

I have often written here about giving away my work at gallery talks, such as the one coming in September at the Principle Gallery, about how I receive more from that act than those who walk away with my work, how I feel deeply enriched by the act. Nin’s words very much reflect why that might be– that it is, in a way, my own dream planted in others by this gift.

That it is not a reduction of myself but is instead an expansion.

I feel my infinity in the giving.

Of course, it doesn’t make a lot of economic sense but that is a small concern when set against all that I get back in return from this act of giving. It opens up avenues to the better part of myself, ones that I could never have found or experienced when I was still that young painter, trying to hoard myself.

Foolish Child.

Here’s a memorable song from 1970, O-o-h Child, from The Five Stairsteps. They were a family band from Chicago that preceded the Jackson Five and were for a while considered the first family of soul. This song was a huge hit for them and has been covered by a number of artists. Great song, great message.

I am feeling generous this morning and not going to say the word. You know what word I am talking about.