The art that most inspires me is art that keeps me so busy looking, touching, and experiencing, that I forget who made it.

The Kiss, by French sculptor Auguste Rodin, is a great example.

The Kiss, 1886, by Auguste Rodin. Photographed by Philipp Weissenbacher

Artists’ Lives Shape Their Art

Once I re-emerge from a great work, I puzzle my way through it, to understand intellectually how it worked emotionally, and learn more about the history of the work. Having exhausted my own bookshelves, I’ve been reading far too many wikipedia biographies of famous people– Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Lewis Carroll, Maurice Sendak (who wrote Where The Wild Things Are), and Rudyard Kipling.

Accidents of Biography Inform Art

It’s hard to ignore the way accidents of biography inform the finished work. Saint-Exupery’s plane crash shows up in The Little Prince. Carroll’s love of wordplay and math show up in the Alice books. For the operatic adaption of Where The Wild Things Are, Sendak named each of the monsters after his aunts. And, as for Kipling, India keeps reappearing.

I’m drawing on fairly well-known examples here, but I think the clarity of the example illustrate how non radical the concept is.

Reading Backwards – from Art to Artist

The concept of biography informing art gets dicy when it becomes my own life, and my art. With the myth of the suffering artist locked in the garret, I’m under the impression that other people will be looking for these tendencies in my work. This makes me alternatively egotistical and self conscious. (Maybe it’s the same thing).

If the painting’s black: What will they think? Are there too many fantastical, unhappy creatures? Is it just me deciding that the creature is unhappy? What’s on the page, and what’s in my head?

While most of this is pointless thought, the lack of objectivity is problematic. If I can’t see what they see, I have no chance of seeing the finished work.

I’ve resolved to DO The Work First and stop worrying about it to the best of my ability.

This goes for most things.