TWO SOLITUDES MEET
A musing on art, love, and madness.
I think I feel the most myself when I am adrift. Beholden to no one, neither here nor there, in-between friends, jobs, cities, lovers. I like the feeling of not knowing: wondering what’s to come, missing what has passed. Maybe I like to exist in the longing.
Presence extinguishes fantasy, and the current circumstances of my life are such that I need to see reality starkly and move quickly in order to survive. In this way, I’m strapped to life. Opportunities to linger in the liminal feel few and far between, and life’s shimmer—that tangible experience of all the possibilities, all the connections that morph the mind/body experience into something transcendent—feels faded. It’s felt like this for a while now.
In a bid to recover some of that shimmer, I sought the past—specifically in the form of Lee Krasner’s The Seasons (1957). I was reminded of an anecdote S—, my artist friend in DC, told me last summer over dim-sum. She had just given birth for the first time, something she never wanted for herself, and the experience threw her insides off-kilter. They put her on antidepressants to cope.
The charming thing about anecdotes is that even if the details get mixed up in the telling, it doesn’t matter. It’s the feeling they impart, the universality of the so-called lessons learned that mark the significance of an anecdote. I’d been telling S— about the experience of my unrequited second love. I broke the heart of my first love, so it felt only right that my second would break mine. We were discussing whether it was possible for two artists working in the same medium, who shared the same ambitions, to be together in the long-run. This second love had also been a writer, though he was far more accomplished than I was (am—for now) and more importantly, he had been my teacher. I wanted to be with him and best him at the same time, but the overwhelming sense I got the more I fed my fantasies was that I was prepared to give up my entire self—my ambitions, my freedom, my future—to serve him.
Lee Krasner actually did that for Jackson Pollock. When they first met, she was the more connected and renowned painter, and she made sure he got every advantage launching his career. He was a terrible womanizer and an alcoholic throughout their marriage—that combination is enough for any woman to imagine just how miserable he must have made her. It’s been said that during the years when their connection waned, Krasner would fuse their styles and pieces of his art into hers, creating a connection between them in art where they lacked in life.
She consistently created art, but her work was overshadowed by the growing prominence of his. S— focused her anecdote on the difference in scale in the paintings Krasner produced during and after their marriage. He painted on towering, expansive canvases in a large barn-house while she was relegated to a tiny upstairs bedroom to paint on small canvases. It was only after Pollock was killed in a car crash (with his mistress by his side) that Krasner, quite literally, took up space.
The Seasons is one of the paintings that came out of her widowed period. Massive in scale, with great sweeping strokes that feel bold, fertile, and bright, it is a testament to a woman claiming herself after making herself small for a man for too long.
I watched my beautiful friend, slightly muted from the drugs, disappear into her thoughts. We were so different, she and I. She needed order, control, convention (besides not wanting to have kids) to feel safe. I was all chaos, subconscious instinct, and bohemian whims (despite wanting to have kids). Am I trying to contain my natural energies in a framework of consciousness I’ve never fully occupied? Will I ever not feel at odds? Is what we see all there is to life?1 A vastness roils inside me.
During the pandemic, S—’s creative process deviated from routine. To put it in her words, an unexpected darkness sprang forth and she had no control over any of it. I interpreted this as a loss of awareness, a kind of channeling that can occur in the more untethered realms of consciousness. The self/ego steps aside to make way for a force that is not of one’s own making. She said she never wanted to create from that energy ever again.
Memory moves in funny ways. It can persist like a thorn, altering the way we experience the ongoing present, or it can appear from out of nowhere, the weight of it feeling heavier at this further point in time than when it happened or since.
In the months since I let go of that unrequited love, I met a man whose deceit affected me emotionally in ways I only recently, unbidden, began to reckon with. Words, the very foundation on which my consciousness thrives, had been tainted by mistrust. (Far better that I henceforth take in the measure of a man’s maturity and mindset through the proof of his actions.)
Though the potential for partnership feels like it could come at a cost to my creative life, I’ve continued to seek this connection believing that, with the right person, being together will feel less like a loss of self.
Spending time with other artists generally feels easier for me than dating to date. These encounters are lighthearted and cerebral, comparing processes, sharing inspirations, expecting nothing from each other other than the moments we share. I recognize in them the abiding loneliness I carry from person to person, the compulsive searching that compels me to create, the stupid need for love that I keep denying in myself. My basic human need to be comforted and needed has often felt at odds with what I feel I require as an artist: to be free not only of obligation but of emotional attachment and, too, of a constant consciousness in close proximity—which can feel intrusive and overwhelming to the sensitive mind. Though the potential for partnership feels like it could come at a cost to my creative life, I’ve continued to seek this connection believing that, with the right person, being together will feel less like a loss of self.
One endless night, I found myself mesmerized by a painting in the home of an artist whom we could consider a painter and will call A—, though the painting before me was not his. It was his brother’s, a man both driven and deterred by his schizophrenic demons to paint. He did not create consistently but when he did, his paintings were at a level not even A— admitted he could ever achieve. The painting I was staring at quite literally moved. I was trying to figure it out. Section by section it made sense: two eyes, a nose, mouth, cheekbones, the brush strokes, the colors. Altogether, however, the effect was something else. Wild, disturbing, incredible. When I say it moved I mean there was movement. The place S— dared not go to create was present here.
A— was oblivious to my private experience because he was having his own, huddled over his phone grumbling about emails. He was at the peak of his commercial success, much of it due to his self-management and relationship-building. There were parameters he allowed his mind to play within when he was in the flow of creating but he reeled himself in to match the cadence of the world. He had deadlines and expectations to meet. Time was a finite thing. He could never permit himself to go there because you risk losing yourself in the process. (“Your” “self” — ha.)
Some days later, I was aimlessly wandering the city (my preferred pastime) when I came across A—’s unmistakable art emblazoned on a shop window. It was one of the national campaigns he had been commissioned for. His art was happy — easy to like, easy to sell. There was nothing complicated about it, no darkness or depth to excavate. I studied it knowing he never held onto any of his work tightly, that as soon as he wrapped up one he was onto the next. The cadence of the world. I thought of the manuscript I kept setting aside because writing it made me feel like I was going crazy. The story was happening to me — or so I believed.
What would be the cost of losing myself for it?
No.