Artists

[Karen Newcombe <kln@staralliance.com>]

>Come on now, don't you
>really wonder *how she does it*? How can she be "in the world, but not
>of the world", as some religious people put it (usually without living
>up to it very well, either).
>
>--Ron

I know how she does it.  I do it too, and so do some others on this list.
You take your pencil (or piano) in hand and work. 

I think the point I'm trying to make is perhaps better made by the
following, about writing, but it extends to all art:

"A writer's pulse, the beat passing through the work that makes the work
her own, is the only signature she needs.  Shakespeare is the best example
of a writer about whom we know almost nothing and yet whose voice is so
distinctive that if we met him on the street we are sure we should
recognise him at once.  Shakespeare's impersonality is not lack of
personality in fact, the everywhereness of Shakespeare in his plays has
encouraged endless attempts to reconstruct the man.  But what can we say
about him?  That he is a Royalist and that he is not.  That he belives in
Order and that he does not.  That he despises women and that he venerates
them.  That he is an advocate of excess and lectures against it.  That he
believes that some murders are justifiable but that no murderer is.  Like
The Bible, the Works of Shakespeare can be used to prove anything.  Like
the massive central presence of Godhead in The Bible, the central presence
of Shakespeare is all pervasive, but what is it?  As we conficently come to
talk about the solid presence that meets us at every performance, at every
reading, we find we cannot talk about it at all."

					-- Jeannette Winterson, Art Objects
					   "A Word of My Own"

Karen  kln@staralliance.com