Our Suite101 Feature Writer blogs are being removed from the site as of May 1, so I'll repost some of the entries that got the most traffic here....
For many artists, the creation of a unique persona and lifestyle is often as interesting as creating the art itself. Never one to quietly accept what he’d been handed, the great James McNeill Whistler rejected the notion of being born in sensible Lowell, Massachusetts and instead invented alternate backdrops for his coming into being. ("I shall be born when and where I want, and I do not choose to be born in Lowell….") While Whistler's actual and not fabricated childhood was in Europe, he found himself putting in an incongruous stint at West Point Academy following the death of his father. He then headed to Paris to pursue the whole bohemian artist experience before eventually making London his home base.
Robert M. Crunden’s book American Salons features fascinating characters like Whistler who reinvented themselves between the 19th and 20th centuries, and in the process changed the course of art, fiction, poetry, music and life in general. Here's an excerpt regarding Whistler’s painting method:
Nature gave him its inspiration, while the Japanese gave him intuitions about what to do with it…He had a large palette, a board two feet by three with a butterfly inlaid at one corner, on which he laid out his colors, the pure at the top. He then mixed large quantities of the prevailing color in the intended picture, producing results so juicy that he called it “sauce”…[h]e had to lay his canvas on the ground because the sauce would run if the canvas were in any way tilted -- sometimes it did anyway, and he often accepted the accidental results….
"If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this." (James McNeill Whistler, 1834-1903)
Pictured: Whistler's 1900 Gray and Gold -- The Golden Bay (Hunter Museum of American Art)
