From the Pit

By Tamara Lee


Last night, sitting out in my friend’s backyard, I watched the flames from the fire pit leap into the early fall air. While we discussed our respective creative arts—she’s a painter—I heard her insist with a hint of frustration, “I’m not really creating anymore, but I am painting a little still.”

Her money-making career involves helping others achieve their creative goals. Meanwhile her creativity, for various reasons, remains compromised. This disconnect, art versus life, pitted against one another like the fiery battle for Granada, is an age-old one for artists.

I recalled José Orozco, who to his inner depths recognized his own talents, barely restrained by his crippled hands, exploring the agony and dispossession of humanity. And yet his whole career he struggled for one thing: Recognition. Even when he attained it—from the Delphic Circle, to influencing some of the Americas best modern artists, to having his then-controversial visions defended by Institutions—he was not satisfied. He fell in love with a woman, his unrequited love for the tiny, fickle ballet dancer igniting his final angst. Many critics insist this is what kept him from his final peace. But perhaps it was simply his dependency on creating this inner turmoil in order to continue painting the ceaseless tensions of humanity, each relying on the other. It seems that those ceaseless tensions between heaven and hell were his deepest motivation. He might never have found peace. It was not in him.

Of course, the tortured artist thing isn’t just age-old, it’s old; struggling to find the balance between work and creativity—the balance—the endlessly tippering of scales. There isn’t balance, there cannot be. Life isn’t static, if it were, why would artists bother?

When we find ourselves "not really creating anymore," though perhaps still producing "a little," are we being hard on ourselves, or honest? Sometimes, this weekly blog post is the only thing I squeeze out. At least, onto paper. What goes on in my head, the stories and melodramas frittering in there, might pass as creating, if only I would get them down on paper. Some argue that if it ain’t down on paper, if it ain’t published, it doesn’t count. Journalling is ‘scribbling;’ blogging is ‘procrastination;’ daydreaming is daydreaming.

And then, once publishing, a writer’s few publications are often as good as invisible until some kind of quota has been fulfilled and official Recognition finally ignites the publications’ worthiness or the writer’s status as a Writer, self-identification as a writer be damned.

About Orozco, Jacquelynn Baas summarizes: "A key to understanding [his] work is an awareness of the relation between the artist's passionate idealism and his pessimism." And so the on-going struggle for artists to maintain idealism and faith, especially in times of limited output, against the assails of naysayers and well-meaning pessimists. In Orozco's words, "Painting assails the mind. It persuades the heart."

Making me wonder how writers pursuade their own hearts.



(Image credit: Manos, by José Clemente Orozco, 1926, lithograph; collection of Madison Museum of Contemporary Art)