Dear Reader,
There’s a funny scene in the 1991 Irish film “The
Commitments”: a series of quick shots in which a door opens,
and a hopeful musician stands there. From inside, a voice asks,
“Who are your influences?” Each names a band or a
singer, and the door either slams in his or her face or opens
to let her or him inside for an audition. As humorous as it
is, there’s an important point the filmmakers made: people
who create do so on the shoulders of their own personal giants.
Indeed, sometimes the imitation is so successful that it might
be hard to tell the difference if you are not an aficionado.
I used to hear, “You really like Marc Chagall’s work”
or “This looks familiar, but I don’t know why.”
My influences as a painter are apparent. The evidence is in
the work, which is either stored in the basement, hanging here
and there around the house, or remembered with a 4” by
6” print tucked into a booklet marked with the year. One
phase of artmaking included a series titled "Homage to…”
when I deliberately tried to step into the shoes of my favorite
artists. It’s what we do to learn composition, line and
color in part, but it’s also what we need to do to find
our own style.
In writing, that is called a voice. It’s a more difficult
journey to describe because writing is in tandem with reading,
and I have been reading since about three or four years of age.
I even remember the first word I could decode: elephant. It
was an earthshaking moment to realize that letters made up a
word that rested in a sentence, and I could read it without
help from an illustration or my mother.
What of style and voice? I look at my bookshelves and point
to my favorite authors because I have more than one book by
them: John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates, Orhan Pamuk. But some
are single volumes that elicited “This is the best book
I’ve ever read,” such as Hilary Spurling’s two-volume
biography of Henri Matisse. Poets are easier to name, but I
don’t think I imitate them as much as accept their permission
to take risks, believing that the next line could always be
anything: James Tate, Charles Simic, Wislawa Szymborska, Suzanne
Cleary. When I am ready to begin, I read to get warmed by language.
If a sentence or an image strikes me as memorable, I copy it
into my 6” by 4” red velvet bound notebook.
What counts is how we change as we continue to create, not how
we stay the same because it feels comfortable. What counts is
showing up, doing the work, and inviting discomfort. What counts
is being patient through inevitable doldrums or storms of criticism
that almost sink us. Or being ignored, which can feel worse.
It is okay to make a horrid painting or write a poem that goes
nowhere or an essay that lies dead on the page. These are necessary
steps to get to an occasional great piece. Risky and frustrating?
Yes, but worth the struggle.
