The Journal of Eugene Delacroix

"The romanticism of his paintings may appear overblown to a contemporary audience, but everyone can relate to the simplicity of his journals, where we meet him mind-to-mind. He writes as if he is sitting alongside us, with such honesty. Delacroix is earnest, so restlessly anxious, and high-achieving. He draws from many different sources, which is reflected in a most extraordinary career. At one point, he was an artistic ambassador going on diplomatic field trips to Morocco, coming back with orientalist images that permeated culture French culture at the time. He was enormously influential among artists and the visual culture of his day. “Artists should take time to write, if only to know their own mind.” He’s not the reactionary that he’s often caricatured to be. In his journals, he laments that his life was so mundane and he’s always bumping up against the prosaic. “How can you do great work,” he writes, “when you’re always having to rub shoulders with everything that is vulgar. Think of the great Michelangelo. Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul. You are always being lured away by foolish distractions. Seek solitude.” I love that exhortation. It’s amazing—we think of distraction as being a particularly 20th-century affliction that dovetails with proliferating technology. Reading Delacroix, we’re reminded that many struggles are part of human nature and that we are not alone. Our intimate and original thoughts live in crevasses deep within our mind. They are easily scared away by loud noises and bright light. It takes space and quiet introspection for them to come out of hiding. Billions of dollars are now spent to lay siege to our eyes and mind in our new attention economy. In the process, we are losing the ability to be alone and are eroding human thought and liberty that was protected by ancient ideas like the virtues of solitude, introspection and rest. If we want to impact the culture, we have to be a little outside it and have something to say. Writing gives us a chance to slowly process our thoughts over an extended period of time, away from interaction with other people. Artists should take time to write, if only to know their own mind. I was recently part of a middle school field trip to the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle, where I was paired with one young girl. In the course of our tour, I asked her, ‘Do you feel that we have the potential for another artistic Renaissance?’ She replied, ‘No, I think our lives are too easy. Everything is coming too quickly’. It was a fair, if fatalistic, reflection. Without a degree of struggle and difficulty how can we fully engage with our humanness and make a lasting contribution? “The true cost of anything is the amount of our lives given to it, so without a discussion about the price of our progress we leave ourselves open to sticker shock.”"