Growing into your work...

From Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland:

"Writer Henry James once proposed three questions you could productively put to an artist's work: What was the artist trying to achieve? Did he/she succeed? The third's a zinger: Was it worth doing?

"The first two questions alone are worth the price of admission. They address art at a level that can be tested directly against real-world values and experience; they commit you to accepting the perspective of the maker into your own understanding of the work. In short, they ask you to respond to the work itself, without first pushing it through some aesthetic filter....

"But it's that third question -- Was it worth doing? -- that truly opens the universe. "

The art in this post is by Jacqueline Morreau and Jeanie Tomanek, two women I find enormously inspiring, whose creative work has these things in common:

1. It is beautiful, mythic, emotionally resonant, and intellectual compelling.

2. It is created by artists doing their most powerful work in their maturity (they were born in 1929 and 1949 respectively), despite a youth-obsesssed media/arts culture still uncomfortable with older women.

1.) It answers Henry James' all-important third question with a rousing "Yes!"

Above and to the left,"Two Women" and "The Divided Self" by painter/printmaker Jacqueline Morreau, an American born artist now living in London. You'll find her website here, and an article about her in the JoMA archives here.

Above (to the right) and below: "Demeter's Search," "After with Beagle," and "Planting Moon" by painter/poet Jeanie Tomanek, who lives and works in Georgia. You'll find her website here, and an article about her in the JoMA archives here.

"Since my sixth year I have felt the impulse to represent the form of things; by the age of fifty I had published numberless drawings; but I am displeased with all I have produced before the age of seventy. It is at seventy-three that I have begun to understand the form and the true nature of birds, of fishes, of plants and so forth. Consequently, by the time I get to eighty, I shall have made much progress; at ninety, I shall get to the essense of things; at a hundred, I shall certainly come to a superior, undefinable position; and at the age of a hundred and ten, every point, every line, shall be alive. And I leave it to those who shall live as I have myself, to see if I have not kept my word."
  -- Hokusai (1760-1849)