The Beauty of Anne Truitt
Early Years~ Finding beauty in Structure and Habits
“ I treasure continuity. I cherish it and I guard it and protect it. And the result is, my life is full of continuity.” ~ Anne Truitt
Last night, I dreamt I was in her studio. She was working on a large body of work which was lying across the floor and she was kneeling over it, her whole body moving in grand gestures. She looked up at me and smiled. “You see,” she said, “it matters that you know what has come before you.” I woke up and stared at the ceiling, wondering what else she might have said if I had remained in her presence.
I have been working slowly, more than usual. It might be the weather. Summer is nearly here; my heart looks forward to more time at the beach, but my body isn’t ready for the lethargy that comes with the constant summer heat. I’m still searching for the language to guide my work into the light of a stranger’s gaze.
I’ve been seeking insight into how the artists I most admire articulated their work—where they found inspiration and what influenced their processes. I keep looking for hidden insights, turning over pages and pages of interviews and writings. It’s a wonderful place to get lost, and all the while, I feel I’m getting closer to my own work. Slowly, I’m finding discipline in my practice, creating habits that foster both making art and writing.
Lately, I’ve been reading Anne Truitt’s Oral History Interviews, and one of the many things I’ve enjoyed discovering is her descriptions of the habits she formed early on—first at home and later during her time at Bryn Mawr. Truitt’s reflections on the routines she created for herself reveal not just a means to productivity but a foundation that nurtured her creativity. The discipline and structure she cultivated became the bedrock of her work, enabling her to approach her art with intention and resilience throughout her career.
An excerpt from Anne Truitt’s Oral History Interview~
But (in) Asheville, I learned two things. One was the mountains. The second was discipline in family life. My parents were really never well after the age of 13. They just weren’t. I learned the discipline of family life. I learned to bear up and endure. That’s a very good thing to learn. And I learned to live in a very alien environment, not only the people around me -- whom I didn’t love. I mean, there was nobody I loved except my family, whereas in Easton, there were plenty of people I loved.
And then I learned the discipline of more Latin. I’d already had two years of Latin. Then I took three more years of Latin and learned the structure better. I studied Cicero and Virgil. I learned the structure of the language better because the structure of my sculpture comes, to some extent, from the structure of Latin.
The Latin sentence is a very plain sentence. They’re clear-cut. The nouns are nouns. They stand up straight. The verbs carry the action, and sometimes they stop the action, and sometimes they carry it. And sometimes they don’t come till the end of the paragraph, like Caesar’s praeponic [sp] sentences. I think the structure is just completely fascinating.
It’s blocks. They’re in rectangular, in square blocks. So that the nouns and the verbs and adjectives, everything has a place and it’s orderly. And it’s expressive, but the expression is not necessarily in the words themselves, but in their juxtaposition, their connection, to make sense.
And also the structure in my house. I grew up in a very formal, structured environment which was also beautiful. It had the beauty of ritual, the beauty of repetitiveness and the beauty of the beautiful things in the house. And then my mother and father’s behavior, which was very good. Nobody ever raised their voices or anything. Nothing jumped at you. Some of the places that I began to go out into when I grew up a little more, the parents were squabbling and yelling and jumping on the children. The children are frightened.
…I got a combination of structure and freedom. And I got the strength
…Well, back to Bryn Mawr. I learned the habits that have sustained my life, which -- I mean, I confirmed them and they turned out to be very serviceable. And I extrapolated them and strengthened them. That is, the habit of always getting my work done ahead of time, which I almost never broke except once in my junior year when my mother was sick. The habit of making a lot of preparation for something and then doing it in one fell swoop.
So I would read maybe 15 books or something. And we didn’t have “Post-’ms.” I don’t know how we lived without them, but we didn’t. We just tore out pieces of paper and put them in the books and made notes. But in the meanwhile, I formed the structure in my head. I learned to form a structure of knowledge in my head and then distill it out into papers, either into exams or -- we didn’t talk in class much; there was almost no discussion -- into exams and into these long papers.
At Bryn Mawr it was conscious because it was linear material.
The habit of taking in a large amount of information. The habit of taking in apt information and then simply living with it until it distilled. That’s what I got. And I didn’t do what other people did, which is to wait until the last minute and then write it. I’ve never been able to do that. If I have an exhibition, if I say I’m going to, I’ve already got the work. Well, everything so there’s no scurrying, you know.
So that everything is allowed to be itself. And my habits of going to bed early. The other people, very often people would stay up late. The habit of solitude. The habit of going my own way and paying very little attention to other people. Almost none. All my habits, my way of thought.
Next week I will delve into to Anne Truitt’s r practices and teachings that I’ve discovered…
I see so much of you in her “tried and true”.
Fascinating! Can’t wait to read part 2. x