From an early age, I’ve been a frustrated artist. When someone asked me what I wanted to be before the age of 9, I would tell them “I’m going to be an artist.” Sadly, things didn’t quite work out that way.
I was in for a rude shock, when, in third grade, I received a grade of C for an art class. I thought I’d drawn just a lovely cat, but my teacher, not recognizing it as such, gave me the horrible C (and I was pretty much a straight-A student). […]
Finding a balance in life is challenging. The routines, the career, the relationships, the finances, and family and friends – it isn’t easy compartmentalizing as well as merging all of these together, and too often we become over-involved in one area while others, especially personal relationships, suffer. But it must be particularly difficult for those in the creative arts.
I was thinking about this while listening to Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim’s musical about Georges Seurat, the Impressionist pointillist painter. Dot, George’s unsophisticated mistress and muse, struggles to compete with his art for George’s attention and finally gives up, marrying Louis the Baker instead; so it usually is. Art is possessive and artists are obsessive and for many of them, love and art are mutually exclusive. When I encounter artists, musicians, actors, and such in romance novels, I often wonder how likely it is that characters […]