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February 9, 2004
TT: Oh, the inequity of it
A friend of mine who sings jazz for a living started painting for fun last month. Like most jazz singers who live in New York and its environs, she's as poor as an unemployed churchmouse, so she asked if I'd like one of her canvases for a birthday gift. She delivered it on Thursday, a semi-abstract study in black, white, red, and three shades of blue, done with a palette knife à la Hans Hofmann and called "Winter Break." To my amazement and exasperation, it was really good--both striking and professional-looking, which wasn't at all what I'd expected.As I held her painting in my hands, the names of all sorts of musicians who have been highly talented amateur artists started popping into my head. George Gershwin, Arnold Schoenberg, Tony Bennett, the Dixieland drummer George Wettling (who actually studied with Stuart Davis), Pee Wee Russell--the list goes on and on. I saw a gouache by the jazz singer Meredith d'Ambrosio, "Elm Street Blizzard," hanging at a juried exhibition here in New York a couple of months ago. It was absolutely terrific, and in no possible way "amateurish."
But, then, any number of talented artists have moonlighted to startlingly good effect in other media. Paul Taylor, the greatest living choreographer, makes assemblages reminiscent of Joseph Cornell (I have one hanging on my office wall), and also wrote a pungent, personal memoir, Private Domain, entirely without benefit of ghostwriter. Louis Armstrong did the same thing with his similarly vivid autobiography, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, and also turned out homemade collages that prefigure the work of Romare Bearden. Hector Berlioz's Memoirs is one of the greatest autobiographies of the nineteenth century, literary or otherwise....
Enough already. Am I irritated? You bet. It's sufficiently hurtful, after all, that these people do one thing so well. Why, then, must they rub our noses still deeper in the muck of human inequality by letting their prodigious gifts slop over like that? I mean, it's all we full-time critics can do to churn out our pathetic little reviews. Someday I plan to write an extremely naughty essay about novels by famous critics (most of which--though not quite all--have been excruciatingly bad). Imagine the further humiliation if they were also expected to set up shop as painters or musicians!
As for my singer friend, I don't even want to discuss the fact that she started painting one month ago. Maybe she's a mutant.
Posted February 9, 2004 12:05 PM
