I’ve been told that some of my stories are incomplete in form. They don’t have the standard type of plot-arc and resolution.  “Where are you going with these?” They say. “These are just sketches.” (Interesting– That’s what the art critics and academicians of the 1890’s said about Claude Monet, who now in countless art history books is called “the Father of Impressionism.”)

If my stories don’t fit the formula for maximum sales, and if they only offer a glimpse of a life, a sudden vivid picture, is that a bad thing? Does that make them valueless? Is there only one formula?

I was trained as a painter as my first career. I’m not painting now, but I’m still who I was; I am an artist. And if I am an artist, why would I not make pictures? To the artist, a wonderful picture is enough

The sketches and preliminary drawings by Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, and the seemingly “sketchy” spontaneous paintings of Monet, all have the freshness and magic of the captured moment. They have an uncontrived honesty and essence that the formal “finished” paintings of their era do not have. There is a feeling of movement and life-energy in these artists’ “sketches.” No one today would criticize them as being “not art.“

I think that this essence was what the Impressionists were seeking, and later the abstract action painters were also. That ineffable something, the spirit of the thing, the ghost within the image that makes the life of it  visible. Not the technical aspect of it, but the spirit of it, just for an instant becoming knowable without intellect, and recognizable without name. The Thing Itself, in a glimmer of light, for an instant.

Nobody knows exactly what it means; nobody needs to. There is something innate in it that touches something in us. We don’t need to dissect it, only to experience it.

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You can read my chapbook: "Inchworms: Essays, Sketches and Stories." at my website, Writer to Writer.
writer2writer.victoriachames.com  Click on Beta Readers in the header menu.