Happy Birthday, Paul Klee!

To celebrate, here's a chapter from A Commotion in the Heart, my just-finished book about writing. I love Paul Klee’s paintings, so simple at first glance that it’s not uncommon to hear the person next to you scoff, “A child could have done that!”  But if you look long enough, almost transparent dabs of burnt sienna and eucalyptus green might give way to long rectangles topped with triangles at the top of the canvas might become desert and a faraway walled city, so evocative that for a moment you’re standing in the hot dry air under the bleached sky. You can almost hear the muezzin’s call to prayer. What first seems like a real thing—a crude black outline of a house with a tilted roofline set on a mosaic background of thousands of tiny squares—blue and orange, umber and red—might shift and suddenly become no more than a tilted triangle. In fact, the painting might actually be no more than a study triangles and almost-triangles. That single arch, the solid orange disc you thought was a sun when you thought the painting was a house, inviting only for their difference. Then there are the countless color studies. Blocks of what seem like random color marching across a canvas. That’s it, you think. Just that. Until you look long enough to hear them singing. The more I look at a painting by Paul Klee, the more I listen to the colors, the more I’m drenched with emotion, unbalanced by the intensity, the mystery of how color and shape can make that happen. The whimsy underpinned by strangeness and wonder. Entering a retrospective of Klee’s work, I couldn’t wait to see room after room of his paintings, but what caught my eye when I walked into the gallery was a glass case containing an open sketchbook. Cool, I thought, expecting Klee’s sketchbook to reveal experiments with color, bits and pieces of patterns or images later incorporated into paintings. But what the open sketchbook revealed was a drawing of a farmhouse and the landscape surrounding it, so perfectly rendered that it might have been a photograph. Turns out, Paul Klee had a degree in fine arts, and his passion for color led him to endless experiments in color and form. Over time, he developed his own color theory, which he taught to students at the Bauhaus. Rules are made to be broken, artists often say. Which is true enough. The best of them broke the rules of preceding generations to create something wholly new—and which created a whole new set of rules for following generations to break. But, like Klee, the best of them had mastered those rules first. They broke them because what they imagined could not be contained in the old set of rules. There are rules for writing fiction, too—guidelines we use to talk about aspects of the craft that must be mastered to write a good story. Occasionally, it happens, as it did to me, that someone writes a publishable first novel by some combination of instinct and dumb luck. But there were twelve years between the publication of my first published novel and the next one. I knew too much to repeat the dumb luck approach, and it took me all those years to understand the elements of craft well enough for them to become second nature to me.