Artist and Muse

To answer your questions about the strange tango that informs the primary relationship/love story in the work:

Artist and Muse. I feel that people who are creative, receptive, are open to inspiration from various dimensions and influences. The artist is a channel, a conduit, a seer/mystic/psychic, if you will…who sees the future, reads souls, intuits the heart of a situation through her dreams and daydreams. Her points of reference are unusually eclectic, yet cohesive. Her portal to a meaningful life is through her muse.

Any time you deal with the notion of soul mates and polar opposites, you leave open the door to duality. The artist seems torn between the fierce expressiveness of her transfigurative art and a strong spiritual aspect that causes her to take to heart the imitation of Christ. She’s always trying to do the right thing, at great cost to her emotional psyche…she’s thoughtful and vulnerable, she already knows the ending to the story but understands that—for her personal and artistic growth—this complicated, strange tango is a crucible she must undergo…she tolerates abuse from female relatives because she refuses to turn her back on her marriage…in the end, she releases her muse, but leaves him with a sustaining dream (was the artist, in fact, a muse to her own muse?).

In the end, it's questionable that the artist needs the muse more than the muse needs the artist. He's too pedestrian...he can’t deal with the gift of faith and inspiration conferred by the irrational…he isn’t a creative problem-solver. She lets him down gently, but maybe it is, in fact, a curse…she’ll always have her imagination, but to the end of his days, she will be an ephemeral dream that he will remember with love and longing in his heart.

(Can you almost see an Obama-Clinton representational, generational, clash in this?)