After an 11-year hiatus, I have decided to pick up and re-read "The Moon and Sixpence" by William Somerset Maugham. It was published around 1919, after the First World War, and tells a fictionalized account of the life of Paul Gaugin. The main character, a 40-year old stockbroker named Charles Strickland, leaves his wife and children, his life of relative comfort, his business, goes to Paris, because he wants to paint. He has to paint.
There's something about the creative process that lures us in...that makes us feel a need to create in some medium or another....writing, painting, sculpting. I enjoy writing, but I also enjoy the process and the sensuality that comes with painting.
I think that this book is what inspired me to pick up the brush 10 years ago. This time, someone encouraged me, but I took the initiative to start up again. I have five canvases going at once...but I have not done much with them lately. Need to focus.
It will be good to read this book again. And while I would not go as far as to abandon my daughter or my family, I appreciate the freedom that Strickland does...in abandoning his middle class life and his obligations...to paint.
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And if the woman loved, unaware; does that make her just as cruel?
Or only the hopeless romantic soul, ever more the clueless fool?
If the woman loved is unaware,
to call her cruel would be unfair.
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