The secret shrine of woman artist’s studio
Leila’s professional identity needs to achieve itself in those various aspects of her sketching activities but what Leila needs as well is the secret shrine of a studio. L. Sand’s studio is exactly where the novel opens and let us in:
I had a studio in Litchfield County - a silver silo with an observation-like skylight, studding my country acreage - and in New York I had my loft...So I would pace my studio-silo, trying to work, my peace of mind destroyed: listening for the phone; listening for his/my car... p.23/I
The alliteration of silver studio-silo, skylight, studding that welcomes us in prompts both some tension and concentration of power, as well as a full control of the light and the background. Our initial assumptions are soon confirmed with the witty simile of the studio/silo as Leila’s ‘obvious phallic symbol’, which once had been her freedom, and then had become her prison.
A brief cross reference to E. Jong’s grandfather and his studio, depicted in Fear of Fifty [Jong 1994/a] is worth mentioning. It too faced north, and was a place of refuge and of fear. It is also likened to a palace ‘a west-side palace with north light’. Jong’s mind seems focused on the power, exclusiveness and the higher, royal status of the artist who is presumably the awesome king in his palace. What is ever more striking to Jong’s mind is the obvious abuse of her mother, a highly gifted but not prosperous painter when compared with her father. Erica’s mother wasn’t allowed in the palace but had to ‘set up a folding easel when and where she could’ [Jong 1994/a, p.29]. Although she ‘resented that bitterly’ Erica’s mother failed to achieve or cope with her dreams of being a woman artist. It was at that time when it was a (male) mythical privilege to have a studio of one’s own. Some twenty years later her daring daughter Erica/Leila seems to break the rule and fight for her own working space.
The studio of a silo proves to be the place where Leila belongs, where her art and love flourish. It is truly disastrous when her silo is traded for a ‘mausoleum’ of a studio. It is absolutely overwhelming to Leila’s mind and heart of a painter when her third husband Danny Doland from Dallas, the proper millionaire, suggests for her ‘a climatically controlled structure to preserve the art’, with a perfect north light controlled by skylights, with special electronically operated sunshades. Even the proper gallery below this proper studio, meant to host of works by Leila and her major contemporaries - Graves, Bartlett, Schnabel, Sherman, Netkin, Frankenhaler, Twombly, Johns - could not convince her to stay. She proves an avid romantic who can hardly breathe in this immaculate studio. The metaphoric implications of air are to stress how vital and crucial is Leila’s need of a studio.
‘But I want to charge the air, decontrol it, make it eddy around the spectator’s eyes, make the shakti leap out of the picture and change your life...’/’Oh, that’s such a romantic idea, sugar. Look - you just paint your little heart out and let me worry about preserving the work. 205,6/XII
Leila’s desperate need of an airy studio is definitely incommunicable to a ‘considerate’ man as Danny. The impossibility of a talk can even affects the stylistics of the paragraph above. Despite the framework of the dialogue, there is not a single correspondence between their lines of talk. Leila fails to imagine herself painting in Danny’s dead place. It is appropriately compared to ‘a mausoleum without air’, without birdsong, without the occasional butterfly (or wasp) landing on her work-in-progress. Leila is just too ‘horrified’ when facing the rhetorical question: ‘How could I create art without life to power it?’ What proves power-generating for the new woman artist is not the building or the studio. It is her belief that nature is essential for her art; that nature provides freedom, love, inspiration and plenty of poeticisms. Among the most recurrent images are those related to the sky and the sea. We can argue that the pivotal metaphor of creativity in Erica Jong’s oeuvre - 'flying' once again couples with its opposite - the metaphor of swimming and diving. Leila Sand seems to confront all her fears of creativity on every space level, exploring every possible direction. Perhaps that is why she needs both the hillside and the sea, both Connecticut and Venice.
But if I can’t look out and see the sky and the hillside, how can I create the art? I love to work here: far enough from the Monster Gotham not to hear its mental static, near enough to catch mammary hills - whether in Tuscany or Litchfield County, Umbria or the Veneto. The only thing I like better is the sea. The Mediterranean, the Pacific.. any sea will do.
Leila Sand proves positively addicted not to Danny but rather to her own studio in Litchfield County, Connecticut in which hills she never feels horrified but ‘safe and mothered’. She prefers working in the country where the birdsong does not invade but rather accompanies her work.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998