Daybook: the Journal of an Artist (1982)

After stopping into Pulp Fiction yesterday ("Do you have the Highsmith dairies in paper yet?" CB: "It's barely out in cloth, and publishing being what it is, there's no guarantee of a paperback"), I popped into the Sally Anne on 12th where I found a DVD of that 2005 Enron documentary (Hmm, Mark Cuban was a Co-Exec on this), a DVD of John Sayles's 2002 Sunshine State (private developers attempt to buy up a Florida resort island from its longtime residents) and three books: J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy (2016), Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005) and Anne Truitt's Daybook: the Journal of an Artist (1982).

I had heard of the first two books, but the third was new to me. Blurbed as "[a] remarkable record of a woman's reconciliation of art, motherhood, memories of childhood and present day demands," it is, more metrically, a year-long diary of daily entries started after Truitt's two retrospective exhibitions (one at the Whitney, in December 1973; the other at the Corcoran, in April 1974), and begins with this realization:

"The works stood clear, each in its own space, intact. I myself who, the longer and the more intensely we worked, failed to stand clear. I felt crazed, as china is crazed, with many fissures. It slowly dawned on me that the more visible my work became, the less visible I grew to myself. In a deeply unsettling realization, I began to see that I had used the process of art not only to contain my intensities but also to exorcise those beyond my endurance, and must have done so with haste akin to panic, for it was a kind of panic I felt when once again inexorably confronted by my own work. Confronted, actually, by the reactivations of feelings I had thought to get rid of forever, now so objectified that I felt myself brutalized by them, defenceless because I had depended on objectification for defence." (4)

I wonder what an art therapist would make of Truitt's confession. After all, isn't art therapy interested in the art-making process as way to sort out the maker's personal problems? Surely it's more than that. I will send the passage to a friend whose co-vivant is an art therapist, see what safeguards art therapists have on hand to keep the art and the artist what? -- unified?

Poking out of the book is a mint condition bookmark from the Vancouver Women's Bookstore Co-operative, when it was at 315 Cambie Street (1983-?).