Tag Archives: artist

art, Books, sketchbook

Daybook: The journal of an artist

One of my best books last year was Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, by American artist Anne Pruitt. I wasn’t familiar with her work before and not even sure how I came across this book, but I enjoyed it immensely.

The book is a collection of Ms. Pruitt’s journals over multiple years, and she touches upon so many of the dilemmas we ourselves have felt. We, as in, anyone trying to balance motherhood and artistic or creative pursuit, to begin with, but also, for any artist who has ever questioned intuition, instinct, and flow in their own work. Here’s a map I was making while reading the book.

Her thoughts on art are highly conceptual, and she articulates them beautifully. Ms. Pruitt was a psychologist before she became an artist, and maybe that’s one reason she is able to tease out details of her experiences and subconscious thoughts with such great clarity, and in such elegant prose.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes from the book –

“The meaning of our experience is held in the infinity”

Anne Pruitt

…which is about how we derive meaning from the short intervals between our sensory perceptions. As usual I drew it in my sketchbook.

By the way, WordPress was a bit of a letdown while making this post, and readers you may have some challenges here and there as well. First, the WordPress iPad app got stuck multiple times and so I gave up drafting there and used my laptop. And now there are other issues with the standard post format that I tried to resolve for the last half an hour. Oh well, tech.

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art, Books, sketchbook

‘If you’re lonely, this one’s for you’

If there was ever a book for the pandemic, it was this one for me – Olivia Laing’s Lonely City – Adventures in the Art of Being Alone. Though written in 2016 I could not believe it was not written about the early days of the pandemic, our first experiences of living through a lockdown, and a disease for which, at the time, there was no cure…

Simply put I just loved this book. I read it first on Kindle, then bought a paperback and read chapters multiple times. Olivia Laing is a genius and a master of art and language. She skillfully weaves her experiences of being lonely in Manhattan, through the stories of these artists in Manhattan who had used their loneliness to create, and derives the most definitive insights about loneliness and art.

As always I keep drawing as I read.

Andy Warhol

“If everybody’s not a beauty, then nobody is.”

Andy Warhol
David Wojnarowicz

“Art was a way to bear witness; to reveal things I’d always felt pressured to keep hidden.”

David Wojnarowicz

One parallel to our present time was of course the loneliness that people felt as they stayed shut up in their houses. We often overlook the smallest social interactions we have in shops, with neighbours and so on. It’s even more pronounced if you live by yourself and then these small interactions are also missing. There is a universal human need for connection, for reaching out, for just being seen. I remember my first few weeks in Sweden when I didn’t know anyone. Swedes are wonderful, gentle people, but terribly shy, and they really respect each others’ personal space as well. For most, it means not even making eye contact. So you can imagine, even a smile from a shop assistant was a special day for me. For the first time in weeks, I felt seen.

The other parallel was the onset of the AIDS crisis in the States, and how the gay community were shunned and excluded. India’s Covid Relief has by default excluded multiple marginalized communities. (If you want to help, take a look at #DesignUpForACause)

Despite, or maybe because of all the pain, I found the book so uplifting and inspiring. I would read a few pages every night, these moving accounts of the pain and suffering that gave birth to so much art, and how they created what they did, and feel inspired and grateful.

Looking at Strange Fruit by Zoe Leonard

There are so many things art can’t do…but it does have some…odd negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich other’s lives. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and…of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly…

Olivia Laing, Lonely City
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