Chapter 22 - A Visual Artist and McCarthy

Summary

As an artist working in multiple fields, I am suggesting in this chapter, which is also a reader’s memoir, that paying homage to Cormac McCarthy’s work in paint and in performance is also a form of reading McCarthy. In proposing this expanded view of what it is to read and thus to grapple with a masterwork, I am positing a wider of view of the pleasure and purpose of reading, and I am allowing that responding to McCarthy’s work in this way – because it entails the responsibility to grasp at least something of what is intrinsic about the work – also constitutes a form of criticism, a notion I have explored in all three of the books I have published on McCarthy. Painting a series called The Lost Blood Meridian Notebook entails challenges and confusions in many ways comparable to trying to write compellingly about that novel, and performing the part of White in The Sunset Limited is equally as demanding as writing about it, for the actor is the word made flesh in the act of becoming one of McCarthy’s characters and thus of becoming both the reader and the read.