#868 The Monkey- Tove Jansson

#868 The Monkey- Tove Jansson

This is a humorous dig at critics. An aging sculptor lives a lonely life. His only companion is a monkey he treats like a child or a friend. This is the day his latest art show is being reviewed and like the rest, he reads the write-ups with disdain. He sees the critics as leeches and brainless animals intent only on destroying what’s there instead of enjoying or supporting artists. In the following statement he compares his monkey to the critics:

“The monkey was like all the rest of them. The tiniest crack, the least stain or defect, and her fingers were there to make it worse or pick it apart. She noticed everything, every tiny sign of weakness, and that’s where she’d bite and rip and tear. That’s the way monkeys are, but they don’t know any better and so we forgive them. The others are unforgivable.”

Notable Passage: “He overtipped him out of pure contempt.”

Rating: 7-7-8-6 Total= 28

#832 Fialta- Rebecca Lee

#832 Fialta- Rebecca Lee

A college architecture student has been accepted to an exclusive artists residency retreat at Fialta run by the renown architect Franklin Stadbakken.  “Fialta…is dedicated not to the fulfillment of desire but to the transformation of desire into art.”

He is a humble student and lucky to be there. He fits it with the other interns and learns his craft while being tasked with milking cows and feeding the pigs. As with most stories about a group of people staying together in close confines for an extended period of time, this is an exercise in psychology, with references to Freud and Ovid.

He gets romantically entangled with the teachers pet, he is asked to leave. There was one rule, and he broke it. It might have been his best achievement. 

Notable Passages: “This is the whole problem with words. There is so little surface area to reveal whom you might be underneath, how expansive and warm, how casual, how easygoing, how cool, and so it all comes out a little pathetic and awkward and choked.”

“And what is a love affair if not a little boat, pushing off from shore, its tilting untethered bob, its sensitivity to one’s quietest gestures.”

Rating: 8-8-9-8 Total= 33

#783 The Other- Tove Jannson

#783 The Other- Tove Jannson

An artist or a writer is suddenly stricken with inspiration. It comes in the form of a sort of out-of-body-experience. He is literally standing beside himself and he begins to draw letters, but not necessarily words or sentences. He likes the space and shape of the letters, so he lets the meaning come on its own.

“He usually started inking from the bottom up so that he wouldn’t be distracted by the meaning of he words.”

Then he can’t find it. The inspiration is gone and he stands alone. He misses the perspective he needs to create his art. Without it he wanders around avoiding all contact literally looking for himself. A very powerful metaphor for the artistic struggle.

Notable Passage: “His whole body burned with an enormous unused power.”

Rating: 8-9-8-8 Total= 33

#635 Solomon’s Big Day- Toure

#635 Solomon’s Big Day- Toure

This is quite a fantastic story about childhood, imagination, and art. Parents day is coming up, and the children of the class are supposed to paint something to be exhibited for all the parents to see. Solomon wants to paint a masterpiece, something that will show his parents his creativity, and how he sees the world. He wants his voice to be art.

His father is a cynic, and an alcoholic. He sees the city as he sees himself: dirty, sad, and bitter.

“This city is a crucible of corruption filled with predators and prey and if you slow down for a moment, you’re somebody else’s lunch.”

“Solomon had his own eyes. He loved the city. The city to him was a party, and all-day every-day carnival, where people slept or stood on the street playing drums and horns, and doing dances, and telling jokes, and the big green daddy trees of Central Park stood watch over the baby trees, and cars seemed like animals.”

Before painting, Solomon looks at his big art history book and goes straight for his favorite painting for inspiration, Romare Bearden’s The Block. It’s a Harlem streetscape and mirrors his own positive proud feelings about his neighborhood.

In a string of dreams and hopeful moments, Solomon imagines his school painting is a big hit, something that makes him famous and sought after. He’s the next Basquiat. He imagines a world where he can paint his future and hide within his own art. If you feel like your art give you value, than it does. Simple as that! 

This is a wonderful love letter to creativity. Once you feel that freedom, you never want to go back:

“But he wouldn’t go back. He couldn’t go back to a place where people made him live in between the lines when he knew that there were places where you didn’t have to.”

Notable Passage: on the truth of art: “If you want to mirror reality, get a camera. If you want to make someone understand reality, then you have to lie a little. You have to distort things, to exaggerate in a way that reveals the way you see things.”

Rating: 9-10-10-9 Total= 38

#397 The White Girl- Luis Alberto Urrea

#397 The White Girl- Luis Alberto Urrea

2-Short was a local graffiti artist, more of a tagger. His tag II-SHT could be seen big and present all over the neighborhood. One day he found a way into an old wreck yard full of broken down vehicles. In one of them, he found blood stains and a cracked windshield where the head of someone went through. He found hairs, of the dead person, it came from a white girl. An artist represents the things that effects them most.

Rating: 7-7-6-7 Total= 27

#383 Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart- Rebecca Makkai

#383 Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart- Rebecca Makkai

Peter suffered through a performers worst nightmare. In the middle of a performance of Richard III, he forgot how to act. The words came out, but they were only his own. He never recovered his talent.

He looked to his childhood friend and first love for support. But even he couldn’t help, all he could see was this great actor and the parts he once played: “I wonder how that colored our friendship, that I saw him simultaneously as both Peter and Hamlet. If nothing, it made me more tolerant of his ramblings.”

As Peter failed in his final attempt at a comeback, he mused on the his futility and rationalized his leaving the art world by belittling art itself:

“We’re living in this terrible world with wars and broken hearts and starvation, but some of us are compelled to make art, like that’s supposed to help anything.”

Perhaps we do take the arts too seriously. In this collection we are surrounded by tales of horror and death, see the utter destruction war has on the physical and spiritual endeavors of the human race. But then I am reminded that the first story in this collection, the one that set the tone for all of these tales that place art as the pinnacle of hope, something to risk our lives to save. Art endures, or does it?

“Something used to be here, something beautiful and towering that overshadowed us all, and it seemed so important at the time. And now look: I cant even remember its name.”

Rating: 9-9-9-9 Total= 36

#376 Mr. Mendoza’s Paintbrush- Luis Alberto Urrea

#376 Mr. Mendoza’s Paintbrush- Luis Alberto Urrea

“Mr. Mendoza had taken the controversial position that he was the Graffiti King of All Mexico. But we didn’t want a Graffiti King.”

The town of Rosario was an old town, Its history ran deep and was everywhere to see. Sometimes if you forgot, it would literally pop out of walls or fall from the sky. But you can’t have the past without the present, and the present is where Mr. Mendoza lived.

I think some of this story went over my head. Its beautifully written, especially the writing of childhood, which can be tricky. I enjoyed it as I’ve enjoyed all of this collection thus far, however with this one I’m left feeling like I missed something. I feel like the symbolism is just out of my grasp; like I just woke up from a dream and the harder I try to remember it, the quicker I lose it.

Notable Passage: “I dreamed of the distant bend in the river where I could fine all these floating things collected in neat stacks, and perhaps a galleon full of rubies, and perhaps a damp yet lovely fifteen-year old girl in a red dress to rescue, and all of it speckled with little gray flecks of turtle skin. Sadly for me I found out that the river only lead to swamps that’s oozed out to sea”

Rating: 9-9-7-7 Total= 32