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Apr. 9th, 2003 01:40 amMy parents are both painters, and as such, most of my earliest memories of the arts involve galleries, museums, and the fine art classes for very young children I was enrolled in at the Met.
I was not a fine artist though. And was neither moved by, nor interested in painting any more than I excelled at drawing, which I didn't in the least. I resented galleries, the slowness of my parents' motion, and the silence. I resented having to act as if I cared for something that seemed to belong entirely to a world beyond me.
It didn't matter what really. I was equally annoyed by all styles and mediums, and I did my best to keep silent about it, so as not to be yelled at for hurting my mother's feelings, most especially when we went to look at Joseph Stella's painting of the Brooklyn Bridge, at which she could stare seemingly for hours, hand at her breast, and confessing to me that should we ever be rich, she would like so very much to own that painting.
And while I appreciated the craft, and skill and creativity of the painting, of any painting really, I was unaffected (something that has changed in the last five or so years, but is somewhat irrelevant to the point of this tale).
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, I did develop a design sense, in large part because my father's lucrative career (although I recall his showing and selling his paintings often in my childhood, as well as winning grants and contests) was in advertising. And so I became enamoured of poster art, and industrial and product design, even sculpture. If I could touch something, or it did something, I understood, and marvelled at the beauty of it.
A fine commercial, of which there are far too few of these days, earns a deep and emotional respect from me. Apple's 1984 campaign happened when I was twelve, and it literally changed the way I saw the world. I saw how you could play and shock and entertain all at once. I saw how marketing and seduction we're two incredibly intertwined skills, and I felt, suddenly, that there were so many different ways to turn a person on, but all of them, in the end would leave them with that sick and secret feeling in the bottom of their gut. I began to understand that art could be power.
But, I was no visual artist, and applied myself to the other arts that I had the good fortune to study because of the thorough and anachronistic nature of my early education. And so I danced -- ballet, modern and the social dances, performed and worked in the school theater, and studied music and voice as was required of us. A pleasing woman is a pleasing hostess and a pleasing hostess is nothing if not entertaining, knowledgeable and graceful.
While dance never failed me, my body eventually did, at least for the atheleticism of the technique that I was drawn to (Martha Graham) and trained in outside of my school. Theater, eventually fled from my life, because it was time to do something constructive, go to college, make a living, something I believed, only because I was afraid not to, foolishly more afraid of not having the support of my family, than of not doing what I loved.
And so at the age of seveteen, I was the most theatrical person on earth to ever decide to be a war correspondant.
I was never a war correspondant, although I did receive my BA in Journalism, wrote my final project in investigative reporting on police brutality during the Adams Morgan riots, and worked as part of the Computer Assisted Reporting / Investigative Reporting, team at the Associated Press early in my career.
I wrote fiction and poetry and got it published, while doing what I was supposed to do. I went to clubs and danced such that people asked me, why it meant so much to watch me, asked where I had studied, asked, what I was grieving for, and I invented myself a thousand times, in costume and in narrative, in public and even more in secret.
But I wasn't an artist, I wasn't a creative professional, and I certainly, wasn't a fine artist. "My parents, are painters," I would say, "but I'm not," remembering the homes of their artist friends in East Hampton, that we visited in my childhood, hazy memories of mosquitos and tall grass, canvases and the smell of turpentine. East Hampton, when it was something different than what most people consider it now.
As is obvious, I returned to the world of performance, quite by accident and with more joy and relief than I know how to express. When talking to people I've met doing shows and films, I talk about my parents being painters, and how I just do everything else, not being a visual artist.
But I'm beginning to suspect that's not true. When I create a character in my writing, I learn his nature from his clothes, the way he fidgets with his cuffs, the way he pulls at his pants before he sits down, the way she buttons her blouse, or rubs her stockinged legs together under her skirt. I know their character, their desire and their fears from how they furnish their apartments and homes, from the sheets they choose and the gifts they buy. Even if not a single one of these details ever make it into my writing, this is their flesh, their framework -- the look of things, informing me of the lives they aspire to, living deep within my heart.
I consider how I dance, both when it comes to the rules and technique of the things I was trained in and the things I still puruse, and the way I explicate the world through my too long arms when simply moved and overwhelmed by sound.
I consider the physical shifts that come unbidden when a role solidifies for me and all the times I've been told how wildly the shape of my face seems to change, or my height, all from nothing more than intent.
And I consider the films that I love so terribly desperately. I think of a remark my roommate's sister made when I was cooing about Road to Perdition. She said that Sam Mendes should just be a painter, and not bother with film at all; she is not a fan of his work. I think about the ways in which I've waxed rhapsodic and frustrated over costumes and sets in nearly everything I've seen, and my obvious fondness for the consistent and daunting visual vocabularly of certain directors.
And I think about the things I want to create, and be a part of. I think about the ways in which I'm revisiting writing ideas that were too big for the page last time I played with them, and imaging them in other mediums, and I'm starting to realize, that maybe, no matter what part of the process I'm involved in, no matter what art I'm involved in, that just maybe, I've been a visual artist and maybe even solely a visual artist, all along.
I was not a fine artist though. And was neither moved by, nor interested in painting any more than I excelled at drawing, which I didn't in the least. I resented galleries, the slowness of my parents' motion, and the silence. I resented having to act as if I cared for something that seemed to belong entirely to a world beyond me.
It didn't matter what really. I was equally annoyed by all styles and mediums, and I did my best to keep silent about it, so as not to be yelled at for hurting my mother's feelings, most especially when we went to look at Joseph Stella's painting of the Brooklyn Bridge, at which she could stare seemingly for hours, hand at her breast, and confessing to me that should we ever be rich, she would like so very much to own that painting.
And while I appreciated the craft, and skill and creativity of the painting, of any painting really, I was unaffected (something that has changed in the last five or so years, but is somewhat irrelevant to the point of this tale).
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, I did develop a design sense, in large part because my father's lucrative career (although I recall his showing and selling his paintings often in my childhood, as well as winning grants and contests) was in advertising. And so I became enamoured of poster art, and industrial and product design, even sculpture. If I could touch something, or it did something, I understood, and marvelled at the beauty of it.
A fine commercial, of which there are far too few of these days, earns a deep and emotional respect from me. Apple's 1984 campaign happened when I was twelve, and it literally changed the way I saw the world. I saw how you could play and shock and entertain all at once. I saw how marketing and seduction we're two incredibly intertwined skills, and I felt, suddenly, that there were so many different ways to turn a person on, but all of them, in the end would leave them with that sick and secret feeling in the bottom of their gut. I began to understand that art could be power.
But, I was no visual artist, and applied myself to the other arts that I had the good fortune to study because of the thorough and anachronistic nature of my early education. And so I danced -- ballet, modern and the social dances, performed and worked in the school theater, and studied music and voice as was required of us. A pleasing woman is a pleasing hostess and a pleasing hostess is nothing if not entertaining, knowledgeable and graceful.
While dance never failed me, my body eventually did, at least for the atheleticism of the technique that I was drawn to (Martha Graham) and trained in outside of my school. Theater, eventually fled from my life, because it was time to do something constructive, go to college, make a living, something I believed, only because I was afraid not to, foolishly more afraid of not having the support of my family, than of not doing what I loved.
And so at the age of seveteen, I was the most theatrical person on earth to ever decide to be a war correspondant.
I was never a war correspondant, although I did receive my BA in Journalism, wrote my final project in investigative reporting on police brutality during the Adams Morgan riots, and worked as part of the Computer Assisted Reporting / Investigative Reporting, team at the Associated Press early in my career.
I wrote fiction and poetry and got it published, while doing what I was supposed to do. I went to clubs and danced such that people asked me, why it meant so much to watch me, asked where I had studied, asked, what I was grieving for, and I invented myself a thousand times, in costume and in narrative, in public and even more in secret.
But I wasn't an artist, I wasn't a creative professional, and I certainly, wasn't a fine artist. "My parents, are painters," I would say, "but I'm not," remembering the homes of their artist friends in East Hampton, that we visited in my childhood, hazy memories of mosquitos and tall grass, canvases and the smell of turpentine. East Hampton, when it was something different than what most people consider it now.
As is obvious, I returned to the world of performance, quite by accident and with more joy and relief than I know how to express. When talking to people I've met doing shows and films, I talk about my parents being painters, and how I just do everything else, not being a visual artist.
But I'm beginning to suspect that's not true. When I create a character in my writing, I learn his nature from his clothes, the way he fidgets with his cuffs, the way he pulls at his pants before he sits down, the way she buttons her blouse, or rubs her stockinged legs together under her skirt. I know their character, their desire and their fears from how they furnish their apartments and homes, from the sheets they choose and the gifts they buy. Even if not a single one of these details ever make it into my writing, this is their flesh, their framework -- the look of things, informing me of the lives they aspire to, living deep within my heart.
I consider how I dance, both when it comes to the rules and technique of the things I was trained in and the things I still puruse, and the way I explicate the world through my too long arms when simply moved and overwhelmed by sound.
I consider the physical shifts that come unbidden when a role solidifies for me and all the times I've been told how wildly the shape of my face seems to change, or my height, all from nothing more than intent.
And I consider the films that I love so terribly desperately. I think of a remark my roommate's sister made when I was cooing about Road to Perdition. She said that Sam Mendes should just be a painter, and not bother with film at all; she is not a fan of his work. I think about the ways in which I've waxed rhapsodic and frustrated over costumes and sets in nearly everything I've seen, and my obvious fondness for the consistent and daunting visual vocabularly of certain directors.
And I think about the things I want to create, and be a part of. I think about the ways in which I'm revisiting writing ideas that were too big for the page last time I played with them, and imaging them in other mediums, and I'm starting to realize, that maybe, no matter what part of the process I'm involved in, no matter what art I'm involved in, that just maybe, I've been a visual artist and maybe even solely a visual artist, all along.
