Daybook: The Journal of an Artist

A classic work for artists of all kinds, about reconciling the call of creative work with the demands of daily life, now with a new introduction by Audrey Niffenegger.

Renowned American artist Anne Truitt kept this illuminating and inspiring journal over a period of seven years, determined to come to terms with the forces that shaped her art and life. Her range of sensitivity--moral, intellectual, sensual, emotional, and spiritual-- is remarkably broad. She recalls her childhood on the eastern shore of Maryland, her career change from psychology to art, and her path to a sculptural practice that would "set color free in three dimensions." She reflects on the generous advice of other artists, watches her own daughters' journey into motherhood, meditates on criticism and solitude, and struggles to find the way to express her vision. Resonant and true, encouraging and revelatory, Anne Truitt guides herself--and her readers--through a life in which domestic activities and the needs of children and friends are constantly juxtaposed against the world of color and abstract geometry to which she is drawn in her art.

Beautifully written and a rare window on the workings of a creative mind, Daybook showcases an extraordinary artist whose insights generously and succinctly illuminate the artistic process.

Author: Anne Truitt
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Published: 10/08/2013
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.40w x 0.70d
ISBN13: 9781476740980
ISBN10: 1476740984
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Artists, Architects, Photographers
- Biography & Autobiography | Literary Figures
- Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs

About the Author
Anne Truitt [1921-2004] had her first solo exhibition at the André Emmerich Gallery in New York in 1963. Her work is in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC; the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The recipient of many grants, she was the director of the artists' colony Yaddo for several years in the early 1990s. Today the Estate of Anne Truitt is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery.

Audrey Niffenegger is a visual artist and a guide at Highgate Cemetery. In addition to the bestselling novels The Time Traveler's Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, she is the author of three illustrated novels, The Three Incestuous Sisters, The Adventuress, and The Night Bookmobile, and the editor of Ghostly. She lives in Chicago.