Letters To A Young Artist
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Written in the form of letters to an aspiring artist, 'Letters to a Young Artist' includes Julia Cameron's hints on how to become an artist and encourage the creative flow. Full of exercises - she suggests, for example, writing 14 pages on anything every morning - and advice on an artist's approach to many aspects of life, including work and play, rest and exercise, adventure and security, relationships and sex, personal appearance. There are inspiring ideas on what to write about and invaluable encouragement in dealing with creative blocks and temporary failure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's a good thing the young poet to whom Rilke famously wrote didn't have novelist, playwright and poet Cameron (The Artist's Way, etc.) for a mentor, or he would have given up on the idea of being a poet. Smug, arrogant and unimaginative, Cameron's combative letters ("You might enjoy Plexiglas cubes for tables for all I know") reveal little in the way of helpful instruction for a budding writer. Addressing herself to an imaginary young writer who seems like a caricature ("wearing black makes feel more like an artist"), Cameron counsels that "creativity is like electricity": the artist merely plugs into the current and acts as a conduit. In this way, she observes, "a lot of masterpieces were made in passing" when the artist was less worried about the quality of the art than getting it down on canvas or paper. Yet she simultaneously insists on the importance of craft. Midway through their correspondence, she declares simplistically, "it is fun to make art." These letters can never substitute for the deeper insights of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Mario Vargas Llosa's Letters to a Young Novelist or even Bret Lott's new and insightful Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer's Life.
