It strikes me that an awful lot of people, possibly even most people, can go through their entire lives without ever having met a real artist; an "artist" in the traditional sense, that is, one who can take ink to paper or paint to canvas, whose images might hang in toney East End galleries, and whose work is invariably worth much more after they've died or have suffered a stroke. I, on the other hand, have had the good fortune to have gotten to know a few artists in my lifetime, some of them quite well; some of whom may be reading this very post. Most of them are just ordinary people who have been blessed with an extraordinary talent, not only to take the light which enters their eyes and translate it into a whole different kind of beauty, but also to believe in themselves and their work enough to market and sell it to what can be the capricious and often boorish tastes of the art buying public.
It has been interesting and enlightening to become acquainted with these people and, however briefly, to catch a glimpse at the world through the artist's eyes. A few years ago, I got to know a guy named Joe. Joe was, I gathered, a fairly successful artist; that is to say, he was able to make a living at it without having to wait tables to pay the rent, or hand out flyers for massage parlors in the Bowery. Perhaps one of the reasons for his success was that he actually worked at it. If he wasn't out painting en plein air or working on a commissioned piece, he would spend some time every day, sketching, observing, drawing, improving his skill and his craft.
Joe showed me one day that an artist can actually capture time in a drawing or painting. He showed me a page from a sketchbook he had been working on. He had drawn a room. A bedroom. Nothing unusual, just a typical bedroom with a nightstand, a dresser, a bed, and various objects and bric-a-brac laying about.
"Take a look at something," Joe said to me. He had a kind of half-smile and his eyes twinkled a little bit, as if he were about to let me in on some kind of secret. He pointed to the watch on the nightstand in the picture. "What time does it say?" he asked me.
"Ten-thirty," I said.
"Now, check out the clock, on the wall on the other side of the room."
It said something like twelve forty-five.
All Joe had done was to sit in one place and draw the room around him as he saw it. He started on one side, where the nightstand was, and drew what he saw as his eyes moved around the room. The left-hand side of the picture was actually a representation of the bedroom as it had appeared to Joe at 10:30, and the right-hand side of the picture was the same room two hours later. All in one image. The artist, it seemed, had somehow managed to capture four dimensions and distill them down to two.
Mind officially blown.
Yesterday, an absolutely beautiful summer day, I was walking through the east end of Provincetown. I saw a painter up ahead by the side of the road, which is not that uncommon a sight here. I didn't know him, but I recognized all the trappings familiar to plein air painters: a funny hat, box of oils, paint-splattered shorts from Banana Republic, and a rag dangling from his palette so saturated with paints and turpentine it looked as though it could spontaneously combust at any moment. His easel was set up facing me, but at an angle; whatever he was painting was over my right shoulder and behind me, obscured by some tall shrubs.
As I passed the man, I turned to look at his canvas. He seemed a fairly talented artist, the canvas looked nearly complete. I noted the brilliant, swimming-pool blue of the July summer sky he had painted, beautiful verdant shade trees and the spotted creamsicle-orange of the tiger lilies. The house in his painting showed a beautiful barn red and the classic, clean lines of a Federal-style Cape Cod house.
The only thing is, as I turned to look over my shoulder, there were no barn red, Federal-style Cape Cod houses to be seen there.
Two words came to mind: malleable reality.
I was reminded yesterday that each of us sees the world a little differently, even those of us who aren't "artists". Only a few people are able to take what they see and put it down, onto paper or canvas, or mold it into clay, and then hold it up for the rest of us, saying, "This is the world as I see it."
And it's OK that sometimes, the only reply the rest of us can come up with is, "Really?"
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