Art that makes me cry
Fallen Leaves, the human figure, types of reality
When I was a 20-year-old art student I had a lot of anxiety about depicting the human figure. I loved figurative art, but it seemed to me that abstract or conceptual art was the more serious work, fit for the 21st century. After all, the task of using paint and pencil to represent the human body had been thoroughly explored, and possibly played out. 1
Though I still admired portraits and tried to make decent ones in the requisite figure drawing classes, I thought I was, at best, practicing techniques I might later earn the privilege to disregard.
Recently I realized I’ve created a similar, blunt hierarchy in writing— fiction, poetry and memoir is the equivalent of figurative art, while nonfiction and journalism is the “Serious Stuff.” (Be warned: this unconsciously-created hypothesis only gets dumber.) Novels and poetry…