Looking at Julia Jacquette’s pieces made me think a lot about depicting the\u00a0‘personal’ in art. After going through some of the pages of her book and\u00a0walking through\u00a0her exhibit with the guide, I wondered how each aspect of this experience must have\u00a0been like for her. The first aspect I thought about was endeavoring to distill your experiences and emotions into something tactile and possibly stagnant in its movement (paintings for example). Was it incredibly stressful to try and show that? Does everything she’s created feel perfectly honest and an accurate depiction of what she imagines in her head? Are the stakes of all of these perfections and truths higher because this is about her and about the people she loves? When she depicts her mother, for example, does she worry that she will offend her or offend her own memory of her?<\/p>\n
A second stage\u00a0I thought about was pitching these ideas to other people, trying to get them to take her work professionally. If\u00a0work was ever rejected, did that feel like a personal rejection of her life story and the way she decided to show it? Of course, most art has a degree of ‘the personal’, but I imagine that memoire work is more directly so.<\/p>\n
A third quality I imagined was the way that the public reads your work once it’s out, their degree of personal interest or enjoyment of it. Did she worry that people wouldn’t associate the same objects that she depicts with the exact emotions that she cites? Was it more important to her to show how she felt or appeal to something that she hoped others felt? The work below is an example of this – the sensuous quality of the cream and the sweetness of the dessert could possibly be associated with intimacy for anyone, but it’s application seems to be\u00a0one that’s specific to her own experience.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/hamiltoncs.org\/lit220\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Marble_Cake_with_Ice_Cream_1998_Enamel_on_wood_panel_24x24inches.jpg\")
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