When LionHeart develops tales, she asks me to prepare illustrations as she sees fit. (Maybe some day she’ll manage to put her ideas in order to narrate from beginning to end. Right now she’s going quite slow and with indecision.) A little bit ago, she told me she’d like two images for another story. I won’t say more, the important thing is my work. Or, well, the larger context and what I learned.
I brought my niece along to run an errand for my father. We were waiting in my car for the pickup to come and I was struggling on the second image. It’s still in the draft stage. Bibonne and Kopekchol were together, in sketch form. But my niece is old enough to sit beside me in the car, at the same time that she lacks discretion. She watched me as I worked. “Is he kidnapping her?” my niece asked me, and a few minutes later, “Does she have any clothes on?“
I scolded her for asking me such a horrible question, suddenly finding myself unable to go on. Even after taking her back home and giving dad his order, I couldn’t do anything. Not even two days later. So I complained to my brother that that foolishness may have ruined my commission. He didn’t get it.
“Do you really expect me to draw something with that naked thought barging in on me nonstop?”
“Since you’re an adult, yeah.”
I gather that, in his mind, making art is like any other daily effort: detached from the soul. That’s why he joked that I’m doing it backwards, “Cause art’s so saturated with naked people, especially women.” Yes, there’s nudity in spades, but the art from prior centuries wasn’t made to “sate” (inflame) our lust, not qua art. Its purpose was to ennoble the visible, reminding us of the invisible that makes it valuable. I also work like that, or try, in my doodles and silly things. The great Renaissance men and Medievals could deal with the exposed human form because of their dispassionate attitude towards it, and towards their own passions. But we don’t live in such a culture. The clarity in their souls let them translate the invisible to the visible through the most beautiful forms and thus raise the minds and souls of others. This, to answer my brother, has to do with the soul’s condition, which impacts the work wrought. Mine isn’t so clear as those of the greats I seek to imitate, and that ensures that my dabblings aren’t, either. And even if my soul were that clear, the culture is not.
What say you?