Review: Daybook by Anne Truitt
Somewhere between a journal and snippets of a memoir, Anne Truitt shares a lifetime of artistic and parenting experience. She uncovers the practical day to day of the mother of three children who is also a professional sculptor, with all the constraints that come with it in terms of space, time, financial limitations, and domestic labor. She recalls too how she built this life for herself: where she comes from, the life of her parents, and her own family expanding into her grandmother’s years; along the way she inevitably engages with topics of marriage, infertility, life and death. Her recollection of being a parent inspires by the way she cherishes the general experience as much as the smaller rituals that constitute it, like a candle-lit family dinner.
The book is also a great testimony for the challenges and existential questions a professional artist will encounter, such as dealing with critics, unconstructive feedback, and what it means to ‘keep going’ no matter what. With that context in mind, we can only recognize Anne Truitt’s incredible modernity, in the originality and boldness of the pieces she created, as much as the courage needed to navigate the art world in the last fifty years, as a woman sculptor. Perhaps her biggest gift is the unbreakable determination and authenticity leading her to build her career over time.
Although written in an unusual format, with a variety of entries sometimes lacking the structure or order one would expect in essays, the integrity of her voice stands out as the connective tissue, always going back to questioning her artistic calling and the quality of her work. Like a subtext to her creations, we can understand her passion, her ‘obsession’ for the craft, a very intuitive pursuit grounded in materiality and color, and focused on the process itself for a big part of her life. In sharing her meaning and aspiration, we perceive a spiritual approach to her work, like a devotion or surrender to everyday practice.
If the audiobook version provides an interesting and more intimate setting with a narration by the author herself, we wished the book came with photographs to better illustrate some of the most abstract artistic concepts dear to the author. The format of the narrative can seem unusual, but in between journal notes and poetic encounters, we find thought provoking philosophical passages, spread like little gems, making us want to pause to digest.
“It is ultimately character that underwrites art. The quality of art can only reflect the quality and range of a person’s sensitivity, intellect, perception, and experience. [...] Sometimes artists use their work for ends that have nothing to do with art, placing it rather at the service of their ambitions for themselves in the world. This forces their higher parts to serve their lower parts in a sad inversion of values. And is, in art perhaps more than any other profession, self-defeating. Purity of aspiration seems virtually prerequisite to genuine aspiration.”
Daybook is a dense patchwork, but one that grows and changes our perspective on fundamental questions about the creative process, a lovely guide to keep on a nightstand and to revisit from time to time, the kind of book where ideas resonate and evolve differently as the reader, and perhaps aspiring artist, grows.
