What Do Artists Think? Jean Kreamer Do you feel that artists need to build a relationship with their subjects or do they need to remain detached? Speaking only for myself, I always seem to build a relationship with a subject I am painting/drawing. Those to which I most strongly am attached have a strong attachment to my life. Images of childhood, my past life, family, and locales where I have lived and visited resonate with magnetism both intellectual and emotional. These concurrently seem to be the most compelling to paint or draw. Somehow my art is part of the fiber of my life and never detached. We are all inundated every day with thousands of images to the point that we have become visually ambivalent. How do you break through the numbness and complacency? No all images attract in the same way as not all notes in music carry the same meaning and feel. Growing into my life as an artist, I am emerging with a sharper eye and sensibility for what I see and feel. Often images are compelling but not paintable to me. as a graduate student I studied media as it appears in educational settings, tricks of movement, bright color and loud audio are the most bombastic and likely are good segues into what people remember, but not what I ultimately create. I prefer thinking about and being drawn to images – no guarantees of success only confidence in a choice. When did you realize that you wanted to be an artist? Always knowing my propinquity for creating, it is hard to remember a time when I didn’t know myself as an artist. The degree to giving full sail to this has taken a lifetime. In ways not obvious, this is especially true. The sheer enjoyment of creating music, drawings, horticultural bounty, meals, clothes combinations, writing, has been conscience and unconscious integral parts of my life for as long as my memory has existed. It’s taken Graceful Lady Age to tease the mature artist out of me! Can you teach somebody to be an artist or is it an innate ability? When can you not teach someone to be an artist? Accepting that in life there are an infinite number of degrees of being an artist, then a life well lived is an art as much as paint on paper. The question is can you teach someone to enjoy life as an art? How do you feel about people’s reaction to your work? It depends on who is reacting! Happily and luckily I have a very select and special group of mentors whose opinions and reactions I trust; their reactions are invaluable. Grandchildren’s reactions are always a delight; often we laugh at what they see especially when it is unexpected. I love to paint for them. Among my immediate family and our children, I find a deeper sense of understanding – they love color and form and subject. The mischievous me loves to watch and hear strangers’ reactions to my work in that their reactions are unbiased; rarely do I every reveal that the artist is me; it would spoil the veracity of their observations. Amazingly, others’ reactions tend to be different over time especially if a work of mine has been put away for a time and seen again by the same folks. What a happy surprise this can be.