Many years ago, I rented a studio, but I quickly found that the room was too empty of feelings and emotions and objects for me to work deeply. The space didn’t belong to me the way my home belonged to me; my home was my insides.
There is a deep, dark, endless feeling to representing one’s insides. What appears in your writing changes the objects and people around you; they take on the qualities of how you portrayed them. A friend drawn ugly becomes ugly. A life drawn sweet becomes more sweet. To draw your life is to attempt to transform it with your magic. Your life invariably comes to resemble the depiction layered on top of it, because you now look at it through the lens of how you depicted it. This is why some artists run away from their lives; because who among us can live forever in our own dream?
There is something introverted about Pierre Bonnard’s paintings, perhaps because he is deliberately painting not things but his relationship to these things. Bonnard painted his wife, he painted his plates and jugs, he painted the rooms he lived in. He painted from memory and recollection rather than from models or life; he was painting his insides. The colors and angles he chooses are the colors and angles of his relationships.
The things that interest us most, that we live with, become trapped in our consciousness. Our minds, once we have an object in them, can never let that object be free. The ones we love, no matter how many ways we tell them they are free, live unfree in the jail of our mind. We cannot release into freedom those we love so long as we continue to think about them.
My father died five months ago, as I write this, and he is still not released from this earth, not as long as I think about him. He can’t ascend; I am keeping him here. And the dead artists we still talk about today—Bonnard, for instance—will also never ascend, as long as they are trapped in our minds. A person who makes art wants to be trapped in the collective mind of humanity. Artists make earthbound things that live among living humans, in order to be thought about—trapped in our minds—precisely so that they won’t ascend; no one is more afraid of leaving the earth than the artist who hopes his or her work will endure for centuries.
Late last fall when my father died, I stepped into a deep freeze; my freeze saw me gently into the winter, and once winter came I had the quiet feeling that it would always be winter. When spring arrived last week, I was surprised. I had forgotten all about spring.
Walking in the forest with my dog a few weeks after my father died, I noticed the green of the fir trees; the colors were so muted and beautiful. And up above was a flat gray sky, easy to look at, the sun dimmed at midday by a thick layer of clouds. All I could see were the colors in nature and their perfect harmony. I could have stood there staring for much longer if my dog hadn’t been impatient, and if my shoes hadn’t been wet. Everything was dripping, the previous day’s snow already melting. And because I felt in that moment as if I had never really looked at colors before, I stood wondering beneath the shadowless sky whether, when my father died, the spirit that had enlivened him passed into me, for I had held him as he died; as perhaps when his father, a painter, died, his spirit went into my father, so that now I had the spirit of my father and the spirit of my grandfather both inside me. And I wondered whether this influence—the spirit of my painter grandfather inside me—was why I was suddenly noticing colors.
Around that time, going through my father’s effects, I discovered three typewritten essays that his father, George Heti, had written—one a personal essay, one a piece about art education, and one an appreciation of a painter he loved: Pierre Bonnard. George lived in Budapest most of his life, he painted portraits and landscapes, illustrated children’s books, and produced Communist propaganda posters and advertising. In 1956 he immigrated to Vancouver, where he learned English and became an art teacher in a high school before dying of brain cancer several years later. My father was a young man of around twenty at the time of George’s death, and he never got over the painful loss of the person he loved most in the world.
My grandfather begins his essay about Bonnard by invoking John Dewey on the relationship between craft and inspiration: “When patience has done its perfect work, the man is taken possession of by the appropriate muse and speaks and sings as some god dictates.”
My grandfather commented on this, writing,
The greatest problem of achieving in artwork is to find and be able to maintain a balance between spontaneity and consciousness, while working with pigments, stone or words, and casting them in a certain rhythm, order, design, and melting the two functions of transformation into a single operation.
Unfortunately, this being taken possession of by the appropriate muse is not an inevitable side-effect of the act of painting. It is not a self-suggested, consciously achieved state of being. It comes spontaneously, if it comes at all, stays for a while, disappears again. It is a warm personal feeling of certainty that something important is going on the canvas. One does not judge every brushstroke. It comes naturally, giving birth to a unique creation. The problem is that this dreamlike existence seldom lasts long enough to finish the painting while under the spell, so the painter usually faces the painful decision of either leaving the painting unfinished or risking the whole existence of the work by subjecting it to an intellectual procedure.
This seems to me one of the central dilemmas of art making: What is the right way to keep working once the inspiration—the being taken possession of by the appropriate muse—has left you? How do you complete in a way that doesn’t distort or damage, what emerged spontaneously? Do you produce only fragments? Do you try to link the fragments by the thinnest threads that are as unobtrusive as possible? How do you finish what inspiration has left off? How the artist resolves this problem is everything.
Of Bonnard’s working method the curator Dita Amory wrote, “Only when he felt a deep familiarity with his subject—be it a human model or a modest household jug—did he feel ready to paint it…. Asked if he might consider adding a specific object to his carefully circumscribed still-life repertoire, he demurred, saying, ‘I haven’t lived with that long enough to paint it.’”
I have repeated that phrase in my mind so often since encountering it, twisting it this way and that: I haven’t lived with it long enough to paint it. I haven’t lived with it long enough to write about it. I haven’t lived with it long enough to love it. What does it mean to distrust the novelty of experience? To say instead that what one needs in order to create are not new things—not new grand adventures, not new wives or husbands or cities—but the same thing over and over again until a Platonic form of the thing builds up in the mind and becomes the model for what is written about, or painted?
If inspiration—the muses, the gods and goddesses—is fleet-footed, so that when it flits away one is left to stumble forward in the dark with no certain compass, Bonnard’s solution may be ideal. The Platonic form, built up across days and months and years, is rooted in a reality that transcends our fluctuations through time: because it was patiently and gradually created in the mind, it lasts and lasts and can be a model that one relies on, unlike inspiration. The Platonic form of a woman or a jug shimmers with all the many layers of life it contains: not the one time he saw his wife bathing, but the three hundred, or three thousand, times he saw her bathing, a form that solidifies naturally and of its own accord into a single balanced shape.
