Slay Me With Your Art
Charcoal Drawing by William Fahey
What is it about artists? Why do creatives consistently capture my heart and lay me low? I invite you to explore the profound sex appeal of arty types.
Slay Me With Your Art
By now I’ve either dated, dallied with, or been in an actual relationship with an artist of one ilk or another: actor, cartoonist, cinematographer, filmmaker, lighting designer, musician, photographer, poet, stand-up comic, writer.
I’m a sucker for a right hemisphere dominant guy. But why? Why do I prize crazy-talented over all those other hyphenated adjectives which may be better predictors of long-term love—you know them: self-aware, emotionally-available, highly-empathetic, health-conscious, fiscally-responsible, mentally-stable.
Here’s why:
Art ignites: Let’s start with the obvious: art is passionate.
Those sparks of creative expression that reach my eyes and ears kindle fires deep inside me. A love song, a sonnet, a canvas painted in gold leaf, a sweeping pan of a waterfall, a hand-colored photograph of a girl in a slip perched on the edge of a bed. Beauty, rage, anguish, despair, hope, love, oneness. These things move me, and move in me, from my head, to my heart to my hips. And now there’s a name for what happens to me: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. Like a steamy washcloth, an ASMR both invigorates and relaxes at the same time. It’s the crisp scent of 99 44⁄100% pure ivory soap bubbles in my grandmother’s bathtub, and the sensation they create as they break against my skin. It’s my scalp pulled tight as nana twines my wet hair into a turban, then it’s those follicles relaxed, blood flowing back, as I’m walked outside, unbound, and set to dry in the sunshine. Now that I’ve connected my own engagement with art to personal rapture, I chase ASMRs any chance I get. And dating artists—as well as just hanging with artists— does set me up to experience this wellness euphoria more often.
Art excites: “God bless the child that's got his own.” Lady Day had it right. When a guy I’m seeing has something going on that lights his fire, it’s dynamic, living, forward moving. And it’s not about me. And that’s good. These men are not retired in their own minds, they’re evolving, growing. They’re dreamers, always dreaming, and that’s dreamy. It’s a creative mindset that I’m drawn to wherever I encounter it, and not just on dating sites, but on the subway platform, in a steel drummer whose lost in the concave surface of his drum, oblivious to trains arriving and departing. Or in a painter friend’s apartment, watching her at the canvas, a brush in her right hand applying Naples yellow, and six more brushes in the left, jutting out at all angles like a star burst. She’s lost too. Gone! Wholly unaware of me, just five feet away. If someone I’m seeing is not sometimes lost pursuing his passion, I find I’m not falling that hard. Shallow? Maybe. But my heart likes what it likes.
Is it also shallow to admit that I’m sometimes the dreamer too, imagining the person I’m with enjoying a splash of celebrity, where I get to throw on a little black dress and hang on his arm at a screening, or an opening, or I dance my ass off to his bright brassy notes on Lincoln Center Plaza, barefoot and wet in fountain spray? It’s sexy to me. It’s also embarrassing to confess to this not liberated mid-twentieth century fantasy of displaced female ambition. (Even while I dream of seeing my own name added to the masthead of P.S. I Love You.)
But honestly, while my collection of little black dresses hang mostly unworn, the reality of my experience dating artists has been pretty great. It’s been enough to just witness someone’s process up close, and sometimes, to even be thrown into their mix of muses, singing back up to their Terpsichores and Calliopes. To experience someone’s art in the making, in the mistaking, and then in the actualization. Well that sends tingles up my fishnets.
Art challenges: I’m a literal thinker, a literal writer, and a planner. My google calendar is color-coded by family member. I come from a line of women who don’t flake and don’t tolerate “fart brains.” I cut to the chase and break things down into understandable parts. Sometimes this is good. But often not. When it comes to appreciating art, I often miss that point. I try to force meaning in an unappreciative way. Art is a barbed-wire enigma, not to scale recklessly with mock heroics or to throw yourself against, like an inflatable bouncy castle. Dating artists has taught me that. To be fair, artists I haven’t dated have also expanded my thinking here. In my youth into my forties, if I didn’t get a painting or a poem, I just gave up. Walked away. But knowing more artists has challenged my approach. Sylvia Plath may elude me to the grave, but I’m doing a better job of letting all that’s non-figurative and freely-versed just wash over me. I’m giving meaning-making a rest. And by extension—I’m letting more things in life float by me, unscheduled and unresolved. And Lord it’s easier.
Art collaborates: For years, I teased hair and applied false lashes on models for my ex-husband’s photo shoots. Before marriage, I’d held microphones on long poles, revised scripts, dressed sets, and stood perfectly still while a director of photography tinkered with clamp lights. And post-divorce, a conceptual artist had me look over what he drafted to run alongside his latest work. I felt privileged. I’d only blogged about dead pets and consolidating breakfast cereals in my pantry. I knew zilch about attaching words to visual art, much less to those less “accessible” artworks. But here I now was, curled on his Indonesian daybed in my tag-sale kimono with my red pen, up inside his head—thinking about his art, then with him on the page, holding his words like thin-shelled eggs, those chosen words, pregnant with meaning, pointing them with crimson arrows to paragraphs above and below. Very cool, and, very sexy. Stretched my thinking and opened me up to new experiences with non-figurative art. Maybe grew my own writing too?
Art gets at truth: Great art isn’t phony. Even artists who play with illusion are going for something real below the gesso surface. And it’s that truth that touches some spot beneath my solar plexus. It’s the thrill that kills me every time. The artists I have known in the screening room as well as the bedroom have shone bright stars that light the way to something pure, beyond description, but deeply felt.
When it ends, am I upset? Devastated. Our light goes out. But then it flickers and flares up into a parting gift: a song, a poem, a painting, a photograph. A memento to mark the commonalities that we shared. The truth of their art remains, as does our connection. I mattered to them, then and now, as they did, and still do to me. And their art matters to me, it’s on my wall, or in my playlist or on my bookshelf, or on a scrap in my bedside table. The art that artists and I have experienced together—as givers, receivers, collaborators—it lives on. And that’s killer.