The Escapist Artist

The pleasures of getting lost in a good...painting?

I’m sitting here in front of a roaring fire on an oriental carpet with a dog snoozing a little ways away, and to anyone glancing through the window it would look like a perfectly cozy vignette.

Life is never as it seems, is it?

We all have an excess of drama and the last thing we need is to hear more of someone else’s, so let me just note that we’re at my mother’s house on an unplanned stay, that the dog has a cone around her head, and that the doors are locked. We are all, at least for the moment, fine, but it took a helluva lot of planning, appointments, paperwork, and discussions to get us here (and we still have to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, etc., etc.).

And so I’ve been stealing precious moments in a little nook of the house, and whenever I can I’ve filtered out the hum of busyness and conversation, and I’ve focused my eyes, and my paintbrush, and it seems my very existence on ovals that are 2” by 2.5”. These blank canvases gradually turn into portraits of heroines with old-fashioned names such as Ottilie and Cordelia and Isadora.

Heroines? Yes, heroines. They are static portraits, to be sure, but these heroines 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.

“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.

As I paint, so I collect: my gallery walls - full of both antique and contemporary art - are full of landscapes that lead the way into imaginative vistas and portraits that seem like friends. I would never acquire a painting as an investment: the idea feels very strange, doesn’t it? I buy art that I cannot resist, and invariably I cannot resist it because it grabs me by the collar for a moment and drags me through the frame into its imaginative world for at least a lovely escapist moment or two. And then I pop back into my current reality feeling a little less alone and a little more like life is a story in the making.

So here, in front of the fire, as midnight closes in again, and a day full of frustrations crouches in readiness, I’m prepared to meet the morning as a heroine would: with unreasonable confidence that, even in the worst moments, somehow everything will turn out in the end.