An Artist Who Wrote
Artists don’t usually write well about making art since they primarily express themselves in images, so I’ve always been interested in Anne Truitt’s books drawn from her journals about her life as a visual artist.
I read her first one, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, between writing biographies of Georgia O’Keeffe and Louise Nevelson, when I became fascinated by artists’ voices. Daybook inspired me to mine my own voice in my extensive journals, which I did in my following books.
When Truitt’s second volume of journal writings, Turn, was published four years after Daybook, I bought it, too. She published another title, Prospect, before Yield was published posthumously.
Truitt began writing after major exhibitions of her work in mid-life drove her to examine why she made art. In college, she had studied to become a psychologist and then had written poetry and fiction, so she was primed more than most artists to want to look inward and then turn to the written word.
Her journals are about the struggle to integrate her life as an artist and mother. They describe problems, questions, observations, influences, anxieties, and relationships with friends, other artists, art critics, and her children. She was grateful that before giving birth she had developed a disciplined studio habit but she struggled to maintain it after divorcing at forty, mothering, and teaching art.
The act of writing did heighten her awareness of what she was instinctively creating in the studio. “Keeping a journal was integral to Truitt’s understanding of her work, her studio practice, and her motivations,” her daughter Alexandria explained, and publishing them made more people aware of her work.
Putting words down on paper is a way to think deeply. It values first impressions, spontaneous reactions, and emerging thoughts. Truitt handwrote and heavily edited her journal entries with a pen, then verbally recorded them into a tape recorder, had them typed up, and then edited the transcriptions by hand.
Her minimalist sculptures are cubist totems in the shape of tall, narrow, painted boxes. They are geometrical and orderly, but her journals are not. One of her pages shows many crossed-out words in her struggle to get them right, while her elegant painted sculptures show no signs of brushstrokes or any effort at all.
Like many writers, notably Virginia Woolf (A Writer’s Diary) and May Sarton (Journal of a Solitude), I practice informal writing. The pages of my journal rarely have crossed-out words, however, perhaps because as a longtime writer phrases and sentences often come to mind fully formed. Still, rereading Truitt’s excerpts from her journals is giving me ideas about using more of my own raw material in new ways.
More information about Anne Truitt
Always Reaching: The Selected Writings of Anne Truitt, edited by Alexandra Truitt
News About My Writing
My explanation about why I moved my newsletter, Jottings, to Substack, beginning with this post, is here
My recent talk at the Norfolk Library in Norfolk, CT about my memoir, Word for Word: A Writer’s Life is described here