The Escapist Artist
“Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness.” That’s the great Harold Bloom who, as he would have said, had the “poor taste to leave us,” but thankfully he left behind towers of books full of ideas that are at once complex, impactful, dense, and powerfully simple. We feel lonely. So we read books.
As my life has, again as he would say, “oozed” into art, of course I refuse to give up on books, and I’m adamant that this sense of belonging and the imagination should find its way into art too.
Why is modern art so alienating? So abstracted, untethered? Why does it have to be so aggressive, and have an agenda, and take itself so seriously? I suppose there’s a time and a place and a style for that, but there’s certainly no shortage of shock-value, conceptual art in the world.
So I feel free to do the other kind of painting: that which will shock no one, satisfy no art critics, inspire no cultural realignment, and have nothing at all to do with any current political tensions.
Jane Austen described her novels as “The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labor,” distinguishing her stories from those of Sir Walter Scott and other authors who referenced the great events of History (capital “H”) such as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.
So if novels are miniatures, perhaps miniatures can be at least a little like novels too? “Narrative art” usually refers to a large, epic scene of action in which a historic event is being played out, so I don’t mean it in that sense.
I just paint little snapshots of characters who are full of pluck and gumption, who are afraid of nothing, who meet challenges head-on and are stout of heart, and who inspire us to be the heroines (and heroes) of our own lives too. I don’t mean to say that they’re reminders like grocery lists or strings tied around our wrists, but rather that even if we don’t think about it specifically or articulate is precisely, these portraits look at us from imaginative worlds on the other side of ours, and remind us that our lives are what we make of them.
They are static portraits, to be sure, but these heroines and heroes have managed to steal away from their busy lives for a moment of calm to sit for their portraits to be painted. I like to think that the busyness in their lives is more charming than my own, and therein lies the escapism of art.
