You Don’t Know Me . . .
February 17th, 2007 by 
Caroline Spector
Igor now hangs in my bedroom, but for many years he hung in my parents’ bedroom along with four other watercolors. Igor and those pieces were painted by my grandfather, Max Bachofen. Igor is unusual because my grandfather mainly painted landscapes. Far as I know, Igor’s one of only two portraits my grandfather ever painted.
In recent years, Papa Max’s artwork has become somewhat collectable. His paintings have shown up at auction and he’s even hung in the Cleveland Museum of Art. (Though that piece is an oil and I think his best work was done in watercolor.)
I never knew Papa Max. I think I met him once when he was very old and my uncle had tracked him down. He abandoned my mother’s family when she was a child. He was part of the WPA program which allowed him to travel around painting during the Depression. He married again and had another family. My mother and her siblings were plenty surprised when they found out about this other family.
I bring this up because as I was reading a bio of Papa Max, I realized that the destruction that he had wrought in his family wasn’t there in that short description of his life. And it got me to thinking about how we tend to imbue artists/writers/musicians with special qualities based on their work. If we like the work, we think we’ll like the person.
And as writers/musicians/artists we tend to think we’re changing the world in some deep and meaningful way through our work, when the best we can expect to do is change ourselves through our work. Yes, there are the rare artists who have really changed the world – but they’re the exceptions, not the rule. Most of us muddle along hoping that we’ll touch someone with our work – and, occasionally, we do.
But the reality is that we aren’t our work. No matter how fantastic we are at our craft, that isn’t who we are. It’s what we do. There’s a real danger in confusing the two. And there’s also a danger for the recipients of the work to think that they have an intimacy with the artist (using this generically here) because of their exposure to the work. From people who think they “know” what you’re “really” writing about, to stalkers who won’t leave you alone, the power of art to affect another person is unpredictable.
Posted in Art, Brad, Caroline, Daily Life, Fiction, People, Writing | 
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