Artists in Love

Summer reading recommendation: Artists in Love by Veronica Kavass. A marvelous photo art book with a few pages on thirty different artist couples.

Relationships are about interlocking personalities, and few personalities are as exposed as those of artists. The work that is created is powerfully personal because it is a manifestation of that particular psyche, and the experiences that make up a personality.

I believe every artist wishes his life partner was a fellow artist. It gives a second vocabulary through which to communicate, another way of being in this world with someone who understands you, who can push you, forgive you, inspire you… and to continue the call-and-response that makes the early years of love so compelling.

The Ritual

Whenever they reunited they had a ritual both of them liked to follow: She would pick him up at the airport and they’d go directly to a café near her apartment that served excellent coffee and fresh bakery goods. He usually arrived very early in the morning so when they got to the café the same people were often there: a group of young mothers sitting at the big table who had dropped their children off at the school across the street. A few singles here and there reading newspapers or working on laptop computers. Couples playing hooky from the day who had clearly just climbed out of bed. They wore that sleepy happy complicit look of having shared a night of secrets and busy together. While waiting for their order, she would hold both of his hands and fill him in on her latest news. He especially loved those very first minutes together in the sun-drenched café hearing her talk. While listening carefully he was re-learning her face, voice, and gestures all over again. He knew them by heart of course having memorized so many of her details. When they were apart he went over them again and again in his mind. But this was different. After time away, those first hours together again were like the first moments in your home after returning from a trip. Everything is as familiar as the skin on the back of your hand yet somehow new too at the same time. You stand there looking around at that most familiar space, remembering things, noticing, inhaling again the singular perfume of home; all the things large and small gathered and formed into your life.

– Jonathan Carroll