The Gift

After a busy summer of exhibitions and failing to write about them here (oops!), I have just returned from a week in Portugal where I read the book ‘The Gift’ by Lewis Hyde. This was not the easiest read for a relaxing break in the sun but was incredibly interesting and gave me a lot of food for thought about my work and how it fits into the world of money. However the book isn’t really about money, it is about gifts; the history of giving; gratitude; the creative person being gifted; where that gift might come from and how a gift should never stop in one persons possession but should always keep moving in order to continue to be a gift (generosity encouraging generosity and art inspiring artists).

“Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. The future artist finds himself or herself moved by a work of art, and, through that experience, comes to labor in the service of art until he can profess his own gifts. Those of us who do not become artists nonetheless attend to art in a similar spirit. We come to painting, to poetry, to the stage, hoping to revive the soul. And any artist whose work touches us earns our gratitude…it is when art acts as an agent of transformation that we may correctly speak of it as a gift.” pg 48.

This being true in my own life, I knew that I wanted to be an artist on a visit to Amsterdam in 1998 whilst walking around the Rijks Museum, deeply moved and deeply certain of my ’self’; what I believed in and what I knew to be true about life. I was inspired and encouraged to the point that my stomach hurt and my fingers ached, desperate to start painting something and be able to speak to someone else the way these paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, Whistler, and Stanley Spencer had spoken to me. Ten years on and I still feel that enthusiasm but it’s hidden somewhere in my heart or mind. I tend to find it again when reading a book like this – I have an awakening of what I wanted to do, like I had forgotten it or lost it and then found it again. This sense of urgency and passion in wanting to paint or make an embroidered landscape picture is what I should value rather than the moment of glee I receive when I sell a piece of work.

This is an excellent book, nourishing, encouraging, very thought provoking and fairly easy to read. Geoff Dyer writes on the back of the book “Buy several copies: one for yourself and the rest for your friends interested in, well, anything”. So my friends…guess what you are getting for Christmas and anyone else who I do not know…amazon.