Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Anne Truitt's Daybook
I just finished a book that I'm going to rave about for a minute. Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, by Anne Truitt. When I was an undergraduate English major, I took a poetry seminar with Susan Wood, who is an extraordinary poet. She asked everyone to read Truitt's book, which is a journal by a visual artist, which didn't make a lot of sense to me at the time. Truitt was one of the first minimalists, though she herself eschewed application of that term to her work. She is also known as one of the first color field painters. Mainly, she make blocks of sculpture and would paint them with something upward of twenty delicate coats of thin paint. She gave them titles, unlike other minimalists, that suggested a narrative which was not obvious in the work itself, or which may at best have been hinted at obliquely in the work. At any rate, she was a painter and scuptor, not a poet. Susan Wood pointed out, however, that art is art. And Daybook is about Truit's life as an artist, as a woman, as a mother, about aging and surviving on the scrapings that artists typically make (even though Truitt was frankly massivly successful, she had continual money problems as she raised three children on her own in the sixties and seventies and eighties). And although she was a painter and sculptor, she is one of the very finest journal writers I've read. She could have easily been a writer rather than a visual artist, if that's what had appealed to her. Here' she is when she was about 85. She died about 10 or 12 years ago and published Daybook in 1980 or 1981.
Here's a link to an interview with her: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_9_40/ai_86647180
And here's some of her work.
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2 comments:
What an incredible book - I'm glad people are finding it.
thanks for the links about Anne, she was great..
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