if you cannot recognize artists by how they look or what they do outside the studio, what does distinguish them from accountants, dentists or the men on the street? There are three sure signs.
Don’t tell me what to do. Short or tall, my painter friends have one attribute in common: a classic, ongoing discomfort with authority. Tell an artist he must do this, merely suggest he might be happier doing that, and watch the predictable fireworks. Where they might listen to small hints of guidance from another painter, they will never welcome or accept it from outsiders.
Please, dear, get out of my studio. They all share a determination to make time for their art, usually to the detriment of their loved ones. You’ve forgotten to keep the cat’s bowl full once again and Grandmother Atwill’s beloved Minton plates pile up in the sink, spaghetti sauce gluing them together. Forget it. Since there is no hope of assuaging the unhappy ones around you, be true to the work at hand, the unfinished canvas on the easel.
I can’t get it quite right. What is in the mind of an artist is always more beautiful, more telling, more truthful than what he can portray on the canvas. It is a lifelong pursuit, but the chase is more important than anything else. Others will be left behind if they try to follow.
It is this painter contingent, with or without stylish haircuts or clothes with curious collars, that concerns me in these stories. They work at their easels, battling the demons that strive to bring a tremble or a moment of indecision to a sure hand. A lonely struggle seen by few witnesses, but, on the other hand, owing little in the way of dues to anybody else.
They are the artists, but also they are the Santa Feans. Trying to make sense of the work of notable artists that went before, the traditional plein air landscapists, the modernists and finding a way to acknowledge the vast beauty that surrounds them, they must stake out their own version of what it is to make art, confounding the conventional wisdom again and again. These are tales of their striving for what it is that makes them different, accomplished. Surely there is a Latin term for ‘seize the brush?’
—Douglas Atwill
Santa Fe, December 2003
Why I Won’t Be Going
To Lunch Anymore
Although it was just before noon on a faultless day in late summer, I had a distinctly uneasy feeling about what would happen at my destination. I was driving in the foothills above Santa Fe to lunch at Donald Strether’s, a lesser known but successful painter of small, modernist abstractions and a dedicated scoundrel. As I drove I mulled over one of my favorite subjects, the making of a living at art and particularly how this Strether made his own ample income from his small paintings.
I painted for a living myself, as did many of my friends. With more than a thousand artists living and working in Santa Fe, it was not so unusual an occupation as it might have been elsewhere. Since the difficulties of harvesting a livelihood out of art were so numerous, my sympathies were always on the side of the artist, even this Strether.
Of all the schemes for carving a living from art, his was one of the more effective. He painted seldom, awaiting the call. When it came, he worked four or five weeks to produce a single canvas. Then he patiently bided his time until he could place that one small painting for an enormous sum. I thought of a garden spider waiting for the single meal of the summer, the meal that would provide until the end of winter. He never started another painting until the last one had been purchased.
In the interim, Strether gardened, sunbathed, meditated, socialized, attended the opera and chamber music concerts and worked on his spare but elegant adobe house. He was tall and darkly handsome and was often included as the extra man at Eastside dinner parties. He discreetly let it be known that a new gem was now available, waiting to grace the walls of some fortunate sitting room. Word spread like thin syrup among the party givers and goers alike.
Hostesses found his brooding nature irresistible and quietly championed his cause. His gloomy demeanor, as if in purgatory already, only added to his charm. They relished providing collectors for his treasured paintings while giving no hint of collusion or design. Allies in the Great War of Art, collaborators in a glamorous cause, they casually seated him next to the lonely bejeweled widow, the CEO’s unhappy wife, the sensitive bachelor or the newly enriched of any sort. By meal’s end the hook was quite often deeply sunk.
The process of a new acquisition had begun. Strether found the gender of the collector unimportant; lunches, dinners and picnics would follow, with overtures of love and promises for an end to loneliness. At the end of several weeks, the purchase of the painting was just one part of many adventures of a summer dalliance. The new collector left town with fond sensual memories, luggage filled with grass-stained clothes, a new painting and a diminished bank account. Happiness, maybe, too.
To celebrate a sale, Strether booked a few weeks in Mykonos, sunning and cavorting. On his return, he answered the frantic calls from the new collector, explained his absence and assuaged the worry with soothing words. He devoted the next months to carefully distancing himself from the new collector, letting down gently. Then came the decisions about a new painting and the season to come.
Gertrude Branch was a dedicated ally to his cause. Earlier that day we talked on the telephone and she told me, “Donald is a sublimely sensitive person, deserving particular care. His wounds from childhood will never be healed. So sad, so deeply scarred. So damnably attractive.”
I said, “Get off it, Gertrude. Remember, unlike a lot of people we know, I get along with Donald and enjoy the illicit things we do at his lunches.”
“I suspect otherwise. Your face is a blank sometimes. I can’t see what you’re thinking when I look across at you.”
“You, of all people, should respect that,” I said.
“Nonetheless, I understand this new painting is a triumph on its own and just waiting to be placed.”
“And what do we do this time?”
“We’ll see that Donald sells his painting, that’s what. My connections are very valuable for Donald. After all, it was I who introduced him to Paul Farthing and his group and Ambrosia Noad, with her millions.”
I was included at the Farthing luncheon earlier that year, an occasion that late spring which netted Strether a handsome sum. “So who is it in the cross-hairs today?” I asked.
“An important novelist. Twenty weeks on the bestseller list. And, more importantly, he has banking money from his grandfather. He and Donald met at my opera benefit, which you declined, and this luncheon today was concocted on the spot. Yesterday they had a picnic alone on the Big Tesuque and dinner at the Compound. The painting will sell itself.” I could imagine the firm set of Gertrude’s jaw.
“A remarkable painting.”
She was quick to answer. “Is that envy in your tone? Not at all becoming, dear boy.”
“But what about me? Don’t my paintings need your launching ceremonies? A hoist from you now and then could do wonders.” I could not resist testing Gertrude a little although I hated the process of selling a painting myself, much preferring to pay a gallery to act on my behalf.
“Rubbish”, she said, “you would survive in the strongest sea. Quite distinct from Donald, you thrive on adversity.”
“One of your discards would do. Perhaps a minor heiress with blank walls.”
“Stop
