ANNE TRUITT Daybook: The journal of an Artist(1974-79)

The straight lines with which human beings have marked the land are impositions
of a different intelligence, abstract in this arena of the natural. Looking down at these
facts, I began to see my life as somewhere between these two orders of the natural
and the abstract, belonging entirely neither to the one nor to the other.
In my work as an artist I am accustomed to sustaining such tensions: A familiar
position between my senses, which are natural, and my intuition of an order they both
mask and illuminate. When I draw a straight line or conceive of an arrangement of
tangible elements all my own, I inevitably impose my own order on matter. I actualize
this order, rendering it accessible to my senses. It is not so accessible until actualized.
An eye for this order is crucial for an artist. I notice that as I live from day to day,
observing and feeling what goes on both inside and outside myself, certain aspects of
what is happening adhere to me, as if magnetized by a center of psychic gravity. I
have learned to trust this center, to rely on its acuity and to go along with its choices
although the center itself remains mysterious to me. I sometimes feel as if I recognize
my own experience. It is a feeling akin to that of unexpectedly meeting a friend in a
strange place, of being at once startled and satisfied-startled to find outside myself
what feels native to me, satisfied to be so met. It is exhilarating.
I have found that this process of selection, over which I have virtually no control,
isolates those aspects of my experience that are most essential to me in my work
because they echo my own attunement to what life presents me. It is as if there are
external equivalents for truths which I already in some mysterious way know. In order
to catch these equivalents, I have to stay "turned on" all the time, to keep my
receptivity to what is around me totally open. Preconception is fatal to this process.
Vulnerability is implicit in it; pain, inevitable....
I do not understand why I seem able to make what people call art. For many long
years I struggled to learn how to do it, and I don't even know why I struggled. Then, in
ig6i, at the age of forty, it became clear to me that I was doing work I respected within
my own strictest standards. Furthermore, I found this work respected by those whose
understanding of art I valued. My first, instinctive reaction to this new situation was, if
I'm an artist, being an artist isn't so fancy because it's just me. But now, thirteen years
later, there seems to be more to it than that. It isn't "just me." A simplistic attitude
toward the course of my life no longer serves.
The "just me" reaction was, I think, an instinctive disavowal of the social role of the
artist. A lifesaving disavowal. I refused, and s6-U refuse, the inflated definition of artists
as special people with special prerogatives and special excuses. If artists embrace this
view of themselves, they necessarily have to attend to its perpetuation. They have to
live it out. Their time and energy are consumed for social purposes. Artists then make
decisions in terms of a role defined by others, falling into their power and serving to
illustrate their theories. The Renaissance focused this social attention on the artist's
individuality, and the focus persists today in a curious form that on the one hand
inflates artists' egoistic concept of themselves and on the other places them at the
mercy of the social forces on which they, become dependent. Artists can suffer terribly
in this dilemma. It is taxing to think out and then maintain a view of one's self that is
realistic. The pressure to earn a living confronts a fickle public taste. Artists have to
please whim to live on their art. They stand in fearful danger of looking to this taste to
define their working decisions. Sometime during the course of their development, they
have to forge a character subtle enough to nourish and protect and foster the growth of
the part of themselves that makes art, and at the same time practical enough to deal
with the world pragmatically. They have to maintain a position between care of
themselves and care of their work in the world, just as they have to sustain the delicate
tension between intuition and sensory information.
This leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that artists are, in this sense, special
because they are intrinsically involved in a difficult balance not so blatantly precarious
in other professions. The lawyer and the doctor practice their callings. The plumber
and the carpenter know what they will be called upon to do. They do not have to spin
their work out of them- selves, discover its laws, and then present themselves turned
inside out to the public gaze....
I am only just now realizing how inorganic, unnatural, my work is. Like the straight
lines on the desert, what is clearest in me bears no relation to what I see around me.
This is paradoxical, since everything I make in the studio is a distillation of direct
experience, sometimes even specific visual experience. Nanticoke, which I've never
been able to make, is two whole instantaneous "takes" of a bridge and marsh on the
Eastern Shore of Mary- land, one from childhood superimposed by a second from
adulthood. Someday, I hope, these will fuse and come through definitively.
The terms of the experience and the terms of the work itself are totally different.
But if the work is successful-I cannot ever know whether it is or not-the experience
becomes the work and, through the work, is accessible to others with its original force.
For me, this process is mysterious. It's like not knowing where you're going but
knowing how to get there....
Wood is haunting me. In 1961, I thought of making bare, unpainted wooden
sculptures for the outdoors. On the National Cathedral grounds in Washington there is
a carved wooden bench honed to honey color by weather. It stands under a tree, and
so could a sculpture; this was my thought last spring as I ran my fingers over the pure,
bare surface of the bench. I have been thinking about Japanese wood and the
heavenly order of humble materials.
I come to the point of using steel, and simply cannot. It's like the marriage proposal
of a perfectly eligible man who just isn't loveable. It is wood I love.
So any outdoor works, if they materialize, will not be heroic contemporary
sculptures in the current tradition of David Smith. They will disintegrate in time at
something com- parable to the rate at which we human beings disintegrate, and with
the same obvious subjection to its effects. They will not pretend to stand above the
human span, but they won't be quite as short-lived. They may outlive several
generations.
AU my sculptures have these qualities, inherent in wood itself. Placing them
outdoors would simply shift the balance of power into the hands of time....
I remember how startled I was when, early in 1962, I realized that I was becoming
obsessed with color as having meaning not only in counterpoint to the structures of
fences and the bulks of weights-which were, I had thought, my primary concern-but
also in itself, as holding meaning all on its own. As I worked along, making the
sculptures as they appeared in my mind's eye, I slowly came to realize that what I was
actually trying to do was to take paintings off the wall, to set color free in three
dimensions for its own sake. This was analogous to my feeling for the freedom of my
own body and my own being, as if in some mysterious way I felt myself to be color.
This feeling grew steadily stronger until the setback of my experience in Japan when, in
despair that my work no longer materialized somewhere in my head, I began to
concentrate on the constructivist aspects of form, for me a kind of intellectual exercise.
When we came back to America in 1967, I returned home to myself as well as to my
country, abandoned all play with form for the austerity of the columnar structure, and let
the color, which must have been gathering force within me somewhere, stream down
over the columns on its own terms.
When I conceive a new sculpture, there is a magical period in which we seem to fall
in love with one another. This explains to me why, when I was in Yaddo and deprived
of my large pieces, I felt lonely with the same quality of loneliness I would feel for a
missing lover. This mutual exchange is one of exploration on my part, and, it seems to
me, on the sculpture's also. Its life is its own. I receive it. And after the sculpture stands
free, finished, I have the feeling of "oh, it was you," akin to the feeling with which I
always recognized my babies when I first saw them, having made their acquaintance
before their birth. This feeling of recognition lasts only a second or two, but is my ample
reward....
Certain concepts seem to choose to come into existence. For example, in 1962 I
saw clearly, walked around in my mind and decided not to make, a 6' x 6' x 6' black
sculpture. I can see it now perfectly plainly in the loft room of my Twining Court studio,
just to the right of the entrance and illuminated from the hay-loft door beyond. A few
years later, I read that Tony Smith had made exactly this sculpture; and somewhat
later I saw a picture of it. I have never met Tony Smith, nor has he met me. On the
evidence, I can only assume that we caught the same concept....
The Renaissance emphasis on the individuality of the artist has been so
compounded by the contemporary fascination with personalities that artists stand in
danger of plucking the feathers of their own breast, licking up the drops of blood as
they do so, and preening themselves on their courage. It is not surprising that some
come to suicide, the final screw on this spiral of self-exploitation. And particularly sad
because the artist's impulse is inherently generous. But what artists have to give and
want to give is rarely matched and met. The public, themselves deprived of the feeling
of community that grants due proportion to everyone's self-expression, yearn over the
artist in some special way because he or she seems to have the magic to wrench color
and meaning from their bleached lives. The artist gives them themselves. They can
even buy themselves....
There is an appalling amount of mechanical work in the artist's life: lists of works
with dimensions, prices, owners, provenances; lists of exhibitions with dates and
places; bibliographical material; lists of supplies bought, storage facilities used.
Records pile on records. This tedious, detailed work, which steadily increases if the
artist exhibits to any extent, had been something of a surprise to me. It is all very well
to be entranced by working in the studio, but that has to be backed up by the common
sense and industry required to run a small business. In trying to gauge the capacity of
young artists to achieve their ambition, I always look to see whether they seem to have
this ability to organize their lives into an order that will not only set their hands free in
the studio but also meet the demands their work will make upon them when it leaves
the studio....
It was not my eyes or my mind that learned. It was my body. I fell in love with the
process of art, and I've never fallen out of it. I even loved the discomforts. At first my
arms ached and trembled for an hour or so after carving stone; I remember sitting on
the bus on the way home and feeling them shake uncontrollably. My blouse size
increased by one as my shoulders broadened with muscle. My whole center of gravity
changed. I learned to move from a center of strength and balance just below my navel.
From this place, I could lift stones and I could touch the surface of clay as lightly as a
butterfly's wing....
The new balance my children's maturity is bringing to my life makes me wonder
about the differences that seem to be surfacing between the artist in me and the
mother. The artist struggles to hold the strict position she has found keeps her work to
a line she values, while the mother is trying to grow by adjusting to the rapidly
changing conditions my children present me as they move out on what seems to my
schematic mind a sharply rising trajectory: They are learning a great deal about a
great many aspects of life very fast. What they apparently expect from me is a point of
view. They ask questions and they want what answers I can give. The artist's answers
are only rarely useful to them. And the positions from which they ask are often different
from those I have been in myself, so I have to use my imagination to empathize. This
is taxing. At the same time I must maintain a center in myself so that what I say is
honest. In order to do this, I have to examine and reexamine my own experience and
apply it as best I can, inevitably at an angle oblique to theirs. What I am finding is that
the artist is too strait and too self-centered, too idiosyncratic, and that the mother is not
as useful as she once was. She is too nearsighted and wishes the children to remain
within arm's reach. I am wondering now if some third person-who is neither artist nor
mother, as yet unknown, unnameable -has developed behind my back. Perhaps the
person whose first feeling when she saw her grandson's face was respect? If so, her
mode of being is tentative.
In some curious way difficult to put my finger on, my generation of women suffer
from a subtle sorrow that stiffens us against just such abandonment to the pleasures of
the moment. A legacy, perhaps, from the Victorian rigidity that in America bypassed the
Edwardian frivolity and descended to us in the form of standards precluding pagan joy.
Many of us have been lonely too, deprived by our male peers of that sensitivity they
had to brutalize out of themselves in order to undergo the Second World War.
Confronted by the probability of their own deaths, it seems to me that many of the most
percipient men of my generation killed off those parts of themselves that were most
vulnerable to pain, and thus lost forever a delicacy of feeling on which intimacy
depends. To a less tragic extent, we women also had to harden ourselves and stood to
lose with them the vulnerability that is one of the guardians of the human spirit.
Anne Truitt, excerpts (1974-79) from Daybook: The journal of an artist (Middlesex: Penguin, i982), 10-
11, 23-24,40-41, 51-52, 81-82, 96,115,117,128,179-80, 200-201.