Book DescriptionReaders who fell in love with The Eighth Lively Art will delight in the stories and profiles that the painter and paleontologist Wesley Wehr has collected in this follow-up to his earlier memoir. Here, Wehr"s subjects--the painters, poets, and thinkers whose names constitute a pantheon of Pacific Northwest artistic and intellectual life in the 1950s and 1960s--reveal a shared distaste for theorizing about their work, which for them tended to be rather haphazardly integrated into the broader career of living by one"s wits. And, more than this trait, all of them in their time shared a moment and a special place in the lens of Wehr"s perception, inspiring a question that their lives answered, in different ways, by example: "How does a young person learn what it is to become an artist in the world?"
The profiles collected in this volume are a mosaic of the voices, episodes, images, and locales that have remained vivid in Wehr"s memory. There are the growing pains of a 1940s adolescence, sufferings alternately provoked and soothed by the presence of Mae West, Bela Lugosi, Paul Robeson, and Diana Barrymore, and other major and minor luminaries many of whom the young Wehr interviewed for his high school"s weekly newspaper after becoming a reporter in order to skip his afternoon classes. There are the rites of passage involved in Wehr"s beginning his studies at the University of Washington as a young composer and finding close friends his own age, in addition to friends twenty to forty years his senior, many of them already distinguished figures. There are closer observations of the painter Mark Tobey, the philosopher Susanne K. Langer, and the poet Elizabeth Bishop, together with anecdotes set on Seattle"s University Way, in western Washington"s Skagit Valley, and in New York, Paris, and Basel.
But, as Wehr acknowledges, memory is selective; "with time the accent shifts." Above all, these are Wehr"s accounts, distilled by passionate recollection, of what some remarkable artists and thinkers brought out in him and in each other--stories of creative people and how they inspired, influenced, challenged, and occasionally infuriated one another. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Accidental Collector: Art, Fossils & Friendships (Wesley Wehr)