Anne Truitt

Presents the diary of the well-known sculptor, which shows her determination to come to terms with the artist in herself and documents the links between her daily life and her artistic creations.

The Journal of an Artist

Daybook

Stephen Schenkenberg

For years and years I was baffled by Cézanne's work. I grasped his principles and pored over the way he constructed his paintings and thought and thought about what he must have experienced to be able to put color down so that it expressed formal values in accord with his vision. But nothing did any good. I remained baffled. The paintings would swim into focus and then out before I could catch them whole. Until one afternoon at Long Lake in Michigan when, walking with Sam toddling along beside me In his little red-and-white seersucker shorts and red T-shirt, I glanced off to my right and saw a Cézanne—exactly as he would have painted it—in a curve of woods. 

I have trouble expressing my feelings in all these passages about the second births of my children without sounding to myself declamatory. The vears and years of minutes invested in the person of a child pull, second by second. And they only pull, tender as hairs. They do not break. There is no natural end. Yet as I write I hear the cry of wild geese in the Iemon dawn. Below them, the sun-slatted earth; their feathers filled with air, magnetized to a mark in the southland. Who would not rejoice in their free flight?

The summer of my sixtieth year is dappled with sun and shadow. Even as I rejoiced to watch with Alexandra while Sammy and my new puppy cavorted in the garden trying to catch fireflies, memories of other evanescent summer nights reminded me of mortality. In a way that is reminiscent of my early twenties, I am caught by the refraction from some deep, dark, and tender mirror that deflects the personal toward the universal. From this fixed point, experiences look like examples of experience. Yet, the springs of my affections are so fresh that I have little taste for the perspective this distance gives me. I wish that those I love dearly should have more than I have had myself.

Summer has run out. I am alone again. The visits of my children and grandchildren have been, in the disarming form of sheer delight, bittersweet, evoking a poignant review of my life. As I lived it, I felt it so entirely unique—not that I thought myself unique but that the moments as I advanced in them each struck a note I had not before experienced—that to see the pattern repeated in detail after detail is humbling. My children's lives seem gently but inexorably to round my own as if enclosing it in a crystal ball wherein I see it entire. And see clearly what I have until now seen only darkly: that what is done is past, spun out of me in a few threads, scarcely discernible, woven into the immense generalization of human life

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