Creating, on the side

Every so often a movie includes a piece of dialogue that becomes an epigram for its age. I saw Oliver Stone's Wall Street again recently and was reminded of the line that came to summarize the financial world before the 1987 crash. "Greed, for lack of a better word," Gordon Gekko asserts, "is good."

There's another line in the movie, though, that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. In the closing scene, Martin Sheen's character says by way of advice to his disgraced, stockbroker son, "Create, instead of living off the buying and selling of others."

Telling someone to live the creative life is one thing. Actually living as an artist is quite another. Philip Glass's latest work, Book of Longing, contains a lyric by Leonard Cohen that perfectly maps the psychic terrain that all artists have to navigate:

I followed the course
From chaos to art
Desire the horse
Depression the cart

Over the last few weeks I've had these two quotes battling in my mind: an exhortation to live the creative life and a warning about the difficulties of doing so. Why, I've been asking, do some people choose to do it?

There's nothing harder, to paraphrase Cohen, than turning chaos into art. There are people, though, who can't seem to help but create. They're a certain type. They always have multiple projects going, and they have absolutely no fear of failure. If one project doesn't work out, there's always another half dozen in progress. Kiki Smith is this kind of artist--prolific, diverse, innovative, producing work that is somewhat uneven, but never pausing or freezing. The hands are always working.

What really intrigues me, though, are those rare individuals who balance a successful career outside the arts with a deeply productive creative life. They fully live the life of an artist, but they do it on the side of another life.

The poets William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens come to mind here. Williams made his living as a physician in New Jersey while Stevens spent most of his career in Connecticut working as an executive for an insurance company. But in their off hours--while walking to the office in the morning, after arriving home late at night from delivering a baby--these two wrote, and in the process changed the direction of American poetry.

Another, perhaps more interesting, case study of the artist who wasn't only an artist is Gerald Murphy. Murphy's story, though, has a different twist. Murphy and his wife Sara did what any cultivated couple with an artistic bent and an inheritance would have done in the 1920s--they left Prohibition behind and relocated to Paris where they plugged themselves into a community of writers, artists, and dancers. They became, in the process, the models for Dick and Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tender Is the Night.

After happening upon a gallery show in Paris containing works by Gris, Braque, and Picasso, Murphy decided he wanted to paint. And paint he did, but his career as a painter lasted only seven years. As quickly and impulsively as he started, Murphy quit painting. "I was not going to be first rate," he told Calvin Tomkins for a 1962 New Yorker profile, "and I couldn't stand second-rate painting." He and his wife ended up returning to the States, and Murphy spent the rest of his career running his family's business. He never painted again.

Murphy left behind a handful of canvases, less than 10, many of which are stunning. The first time I saw his Watch from 1925 (above) at the Dallas Museum of Art, I literally stopped in my tracks and gaped. The public has a chance, now, to decide whether Murphy was a second-rate talent or not. An exhibition of seven of his extant paintings is at the Williams College Museum of Art until November, after which it will travel to New Haven and Dallas.

How did Stevens and Williams find the strategies they needed to feed and sustain their craft in the midst of their demanding professional lives? Why did Murphy, as innovative as he was, give in to the demons of self-doubt? How could Murphy, a man who clearly had talent, simply choose to stop painting and not complete another work in the three more decades that he lived?

No answers today, only questions. But the answers, I think, would provide a set of interesting insights into the nature of the creative mind.

--Todd Gibson