The Masculinization of the Artist

It is hardly possible to communicate with painters without hearing a complaint that is repeated all too often when it comes to portraiture: "It is a pain to paint." And this complaint, so widespread, does not surprise anyone. If there are "painful" things in any work, they will obviously also manifest themselves in the efforts to recreate the human image. There is nothing unusual in the fact that a painter fails to discover in a certain model such qualities that do not nourish his creative imagination and do not excite his thirst for search, or vice versa - does not find the strength within himself to rise to the spiritual and plastic tasks that another model sets for him. In both cases he is confronted with difficulties that apply with equal force to all the arts and are considered something quite natural in creative practice. However, something else will seem more strange - that these difficulties apply to a certain extent also to certain manifestations of human activity that lie outside the scope of art. Such a manifestation is literary criticism, which, although in a different area of ​​spiritual interests, also has the task of discovering the characteristic in a person, taken as a creator of artistic values, and to outline his image with the means of the journalistic word. That is why the literary connoisseur, for whom to a certain extent the laws of inspiration also apply, in turn faces similar difficulties and in turn, for one reason or another, can say: "This author does not lend itself to me." At least I have had the opportunity to face such a failure more than once and give in. And I must admit that for many years one of the "tormenting" authors for me was none other than Radoj Ralin.