The blur of art and life
Quite central to Leila’s creative world is the fuzzy boundary between life and art, which can ultimately persuade the reader that the personal is professional and vice-versa. This is also a sort of arguing with the early feminist slogan: The political is personal. In Leila’s life of the mind it is no longer so important to come to terms with the outer world but with one’s own self.
As usual I don’t know whether I’m painting or living. I have that crazed, semi-hysterical feeling that overtakes me when I’ve been working like a maniac and what passes as real life interrupts. 261/XVII
Being an artist is sometimes a ‘curse’, because whatever the artist does or experience in reality is likely to be eternalized into art. This is a high price to be paid but it is also the sweet curse to be ever creating. This is the drive that keeps Leila in her urge to ‘memorialize’ Dart in the cowboy series and film stills works. This is the drive that rules Leila’s art/life long after Dart is gone. For a woman artist in particular it seems impossible just to sulk without having this state of mind reflected, it seems that you can’t sink into depravity without thinking of how to turn sinking into depravity into art - p.275/XVII.
Leila Sand craves for the extreme desire to make her life into a work of art, which could be revealed as a ‘trap for every woman artist’. Leila is dramatically aware that she’d rather serve the feast, than paint it - 243/XV. At this point she refers particularly to the garden feast at her property set to salute the visit of Lionel but in more general terms to the well-established popular position of women of servants, rather than creators. This position however proves even more difficult for a contemporary woman who subconsciously fears to fly beyond it, who advocates this position even more fiercely than any men. Leila’s lifelong concern with life in her art could be felt in the persistent metaphor that life/art are a feast. Thus Leila’s drawings and paintings are able to communicate ‘joy to the joyless, faith to the unbeliever, and love to the loveless’. Unsurprisingly her words and paintings sound like life, sound like a prayer for life. She wants everyone to savour and celebrate life because it is a feast. Here is her prayer: Life is there for the taking. You have to open your mouth, open your hand, love one another, thank God and rejoice.
Copyright © : Iliyana Nedkova,1996-7
N.Paradoxa : Issue No.6, 1998