Anne Truitt — Parallels of the Artist and Parent

Anne Truitt in Daybook: A Journal of an Artist, shares a lifetime of artistic and parenting experience. Truitt, a widely recognized sculptor, successfully weaved her family life into this artistic practice, exploring how the two could feed creatively and intuitively into one another. At the peak of her career, Truitt raised three daughters, and it was not always easy, but she proved it was certainly possible. For Truitt, the ultimate sacrifice was shutting out the external world and making time for what she called an “inside life,” that of her intimate family circle, as much as her inner world of thought.

Truitt traces her creative roots to an encounter with a single painting at the same Picasso retrospective. Truitt writes:

“I had no idea at all that I would become an artist. It was in one of those deflections that sometimes subtly predict the course of a life that I sought out, just for pleasure, the Museum of Modern Art.

On entering, I turned left and up the stairs straight into Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Shocked, my eyes clamped on it. I focused on the three towering women gazing out at me with the eyes of basilisks — their breath would be fatal — and then took in the remote shadowed faces of their companions. Suddenly I understood that I knew very little of what it is to be female. Even less of art. I had not felt its naked power before, its power to shatter the appearance of things so as to reveal behind them another order. When in 1949 I began to study art, I more or less consciously looked for what I had found in Les Demoiselles: shock, an understanding deeper than my own of what it is to be human, and a mysterious revelation of a radiant order.“

Truitt, who was trained as a psychologist before she became an artist saw the two strands of her life, as mother and artist, to be intrinsically linked:

“People sometimes ask me if I feel as if my sculptures were my children. I do not. The love I feel for my children is unique in my experience. Nothing is comparable. But it occurs to me this morning that they too are transformations of secret, silent resources similar to those out of which [my] sculptures emerged.“

Truitt also revisits the subject of parenting and how it illuminates one’s creative autonomy:

“I noticed that when my children reached the age of about twelve, the balance of power shifted from me to them. I have sometimes felt myself in the quandary of a chicken who has hatched duck eggs: my children took to the water, I remained on the riverbank. But I cherish my own independence too much to begrudge them theirs. I do better on the bank cheering them on. If I keep a respectful distance, they welcome me into their lives almost as wholeheartedly as I welcomed them into mine when they were born. “Almost” because even the most affectionate adult children maintain with their parents a healthy reservation that marks the boundary of their autonomy.

I am more impressed by what my children have taught me than by what I may have taught them. The physical purpose of reproduction is, obviously, the continuation and renewal of genetic continuity, human survival. Its psychological purpose seems to me to be a particularly poignant kind of mutual learning and, matters being equal, ineffable comfort.“