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My life in paintingLong ago I read an interview with an artist who had started late and achieved fame and success in his sixties. He was asked if he'd taken up painting as a retirement hobby. Not exactly, he explained. His hands had gradually started becoming stiff and painful, but it wasn't arthritis; in fact, no one could figure out what was wrong with them. The condition continued to worsen until one day, for no logical reason, he bought some paints and canvases and started painting. The pain vanished as if by magic—and never returned. It was only through this experience that he realized that he'd had a lifelong desire to paint that he'd been suppressing during all the decades he'd spent building a career in business. Once that career was done, however, his painter's hands rebelled at last and demanded to be used.My own story is similar but not quite so dramatic. I was not, like this man, unaware of my desire to paint, even at a young age. Unfortunately, when (at age 10 or 11) I signed up for Saturday morning art lessons offered for kids by the local university, I happened upon an art teacher who threw very cold water on my ambitions. She was one of those people who knows the one right way to do everything. And her way wasn't my way. She was big on still lifes, landscapes, and doing everything by the book exactly the way she interpreted the book. I tried painting her carefully-arranged still lifes, but changed the colors of the background, the drapes, the accessories. "No, no, no! That is not a pink serape, that is a blue serape. You must paint it blue. No, no, no. That is not a yellow table, that is a green table. You must paint it green." "No, no, no! You cannot use blue and green together." (Apparently she had never noticed the sky and the grass.) Still, I couldn't keep my painter's hands quiet. Once, caught sketching figures in a notebook instead of paying attention in class, I received a thorough scolding for wasting my time drawing "dolls." Even so, as I approached adulthood, I would have opted for a career as a fashion designer in an instant, if I'd had the faintest idea how to go about such a thing. Not having that faintest idea, however, I drifted into teaching, educational publishing, and eventually freelance writing in Chicago. I was a passable writer and earned a living at it, but the yen to paint wouldn't go away. At one point, thanks to friends at the Goodman School of Drama, I was able allowed to audit a costume-design class, where, for once at least, I wasn't scolded for using my imagination. Learning of this, the director of a community theater production of The Heiress asked me to design the costumes, a project that took over my life and heart in a way that no writing assignment had ever done or ever would. (I still have the newspaper review that starts by praising the costumes before it ever gets to the rest of the play.) I'd always had a second dream, not about art but about my future. I'd always imagined myself as the wife of a man with a Great Mission of some kind. I thought I was relinquishing that dream when I married Daniel Quinn in 1975, but that was before he started writing a book that would obsess him for the next twelve years and that would change our lives–and the lives of countless thousands of others all over the world. Ishmael, when it was finished in 1991, won the largest cash prize ever given for a single work, The Turner Tomorrow Award, and it has gone on to be published in twenty languages and is used in classrooms from middle school to graduate school in courses from anthropology to zoology, with biology, economics, history, literature, philosophy, political science, psychology, and religion in between. From that time till now, the two of us have had our hands full keeping up with the global reaction to it. But there came a point in the fall of 2000 when my painter's hands rebelled, and I said "Enough. It's time for my own career to begin." From that time on, I've painted and painted and painted, struggling to make up for decades of lost time—and Daniel has been nothing but supportive of this. The most telling and gratifying reaction to my work came from a friend who used to be in the business of buying art for corporations. Seeing my paintings for the first time, she said, "It looks as if you've been doing this all your life." And in a sense I have.
About my paintingsFor me, painting is all about music. I spent years learning classical piano—practicing scales, getting all the notes right, learning to interpret Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, et al. But all that time, what I wanted to do was to be able to play the way the greats of jazz and blues play. I wanted to be free of the notes on the page. I wanted to leave behind the years and centuries of "this is the way it's meant to be" and simply let the music take me where it wanted to go. But at the piano this was impossible for me. I was tied to those black and white keys and the notes on the page.When I began painting, I finally found the way to leave the notes behind. As a child, in my early forays into the art world, my teachers tried to tie me to the notes—there were rules for drawing and painting, and I was expected to follow them. It didn't work for me. But it was fifty years before I finally gave in to what was itching in my fingers and discovered the key. I couldn't do it on the piano, but I can do it on canvas, with a paintbrush and colors. The music is in my head, and it comes out through my fingers. It's the music that drives me, inspires me, leads me to what ultimately shows up in my paintings. Color, light, improvisation, a spirit of adventure, a desire to see what will happen if I use this color in this way. I don't paint what I see. I paint what I hear. In seeing my paintings, I hope you, too, will hear the music.
Some other sites of interestOn this website you can see my paintings, but at our other two websites—Ishmael.com and New Tribal Ventures.com—you can find out about Daniel's books and the other things that have been keeping us occupied. Both are accessible from Ishmael. At the New Tribal Ventures website you can also see some of Daniel's art. He gave up painting and chose writing as his true vocation when began working on the book that ultimately became Ishmael. But when he's between writing projects, he creates strange and wonderful constructions of various kinds.Though I came late to realizing I wanted to paint, my cousin, Jim Pollock (no, we're not in any way related to Jackson Pollock), knew early on that art was his life, and opted to make his basic living as a graphic designer while engaging in other forms of expression (including a stint as a combat artist in Viet Nam). You can find out about this experience and see his work at Jim Pollock's art.
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