What started me thinking of this was a piece on the Jonathan Jones on Art blog in the Guardian newspaper - a favourite art read of mine. He talks about writers on Picasso and his "biography-hunters". How they "collect" stories on him instead of discussing his art. He thinks Picasso would have understood and even supported that.
"There is a very good reason for seeing Picasso's art as a mirror of his life. Picasso himself tells us that it is, again and again. In the personal collection of his art that he left to the French state and now forms the Musée Picasso in Paris, works are dated not just by year, but by season or even month: Picasso was careful to catalogue his output that precisely. Why? Because his art is in part a diary. Time and again, he makes images that root themselves in raw experience. His Head of a Woman at Tate Modern, a sensual, eviscerating portrait of his lover Fernande Olivier, makes you feel you are there, then, right when he made it. Their relationship hangs around the silent work; their passions haunt it. How is this not a work that demands a biography? The same goes for so much of Picasso's art – from his homage to a suicided young friend, The Death of Casagemas, to his last desperate self-portraits".
So perhaps, like me, you can come to think of the art you make and the artists work you collect as just another part of your own biography. An important entry in the diary of your own life.
OK - now that I have justified that, I've decided to visit a favourite Irish artist's studio. Better clear out the boot of my car. Wouldn't want any prospective new painting I buy to be damaged in transit...
