Anne Truitt: Daybook

"One of the fascinations of being an artist is living in all the dimensions of life with an artist inside you.  An intractable and always mysterious companion..."   --Anne Truitt

I found this photo at annetruitt.org

I just read Daybook: the Journal of an Artist by Anne Truitt.  It was so amazing.  I underlined so many passages, a few of which I have retyped here in my blog post.  I hope this will inspire you to read the whole book!  (Some of the quotations may be from Turn, her second book.)

"My work is coming steadily along...I thrive in the repetitive routine."

This photo is from artcritical, an online magazine.  More beautiful photographs can be found in this blog post from the Joanne Mattera Art Blog:  Motherlode: Anne Truitt at Matthew Marks

"Artists who wish to set the light free; which is what I also wish to do, to make it visible for its own sake."

--on her experience at the "American Luminist" exhibit at the National Gallery in 1980

This photograph of Anne Truitt in front of one of her sculptures came from this fantastic Brain Picking's article:  Anne Truitt on Resisting the Label “Artist” and the Difference Between Doing Art and Being an Artist.  

"But the essential struggle is private and bears no relation to anyone else's.  It is of necessity a solitary and lonely endeavor to explore one's own sensibility, to discover how it works and to implement honestly its manifestations.  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."

Rice-Paper Drawing [17], 1965, ink on Japanese rice paper, 12 1/4 x 9 in.   

(I found this image on the very-awesome-blog "Studio and Garden" by Altoon Sultan.)

"My sculptures live in my mind.  I can rebuff them only at some psychic peril too deep for articulation.  Also, I have a loyalty to my work that owes nothing to any opinion any other person might have of it.  I have faith in it, virtual trust."  -- (actually this is from Turn, the sequel to Daybook)

"The sun interpenetrates the earth; they have business with each other.  Air and I are somewhere in between." 

--also from Turn

Anne Truitt's Landfall, 1970, in Matthew Marks Gallery, picture from dayoutlast blog. Anne Truitt describes beautifully in her Daybook how this sculpture came to her, shamefully too long to place here.

"Love is fixed, instantly accessible to memory,

somehow stained into my body as color into cloth."

Truitt's work is now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.  "In the Tower" is up until April 1st, 2018.