Portait of Artistic Temperament

Last week I finished reading The Swan Thieves", a book that combines my love for people affected by mental illness, psychology and art. I found a little bit of myself and other artists I know in the quotes below:

"People love to do things for him because he seems happy even without their help, so oblivious to his own needs and to their wish to help him. I've never understood this. I used to think he was kind of cheating, tricking people without meaning to, but now I sometimes think life is simply compensating for what's missing in him."

"[He] did not care whether or not people thought he had a style; he considered his work one long experiment and rarely used a single look or technique for more than a few months."

"...no, [he] was taller and more powerful-looking than anyone on the is crowded sidewalk. He would have loomed here, as he did at [the psych hospital], although New York would have better absorbed his vividness. I wondered for the first time if some of his depression had come from simple displacement: a person larger than life, larger than most, needed a setting to match his energy. Had he gradually wilted, away from Manhattan?"

"He set to work on a demonstration, and I watched him; I watched his faded shirtsleeve rolled up on his sketching arm, his green-brown eyes flicking back and forth to [the still life] while his body was still and focused on its quarry. The back of his curly hair was flattened as if he'd slept on it and then forgotten to brush it, and a lock at the front stuck up, growing like a plant. I could see that he was unaware of us and of his hair, unaware of anything but the [still life]. Suddenly I wanted that unawareness for myself. I was never unaware. I was watching other people; I was always wondering if they were watching me. How could I become an artist like [him] unless I could lose myself in front of a whole group of people, lose myself like that to everything but he problem at hand, the sound of my pencil on the page and the flow of line emerging from it?"

"I still own that very [book], the one I saw lying on his desk that day. It's one of the only gifts from him I've kept; He gave possessions away as casually as he helped himself to other people's, a characteristic that looked at first glance like generosity, until you realized he never remembered anyone's birthday and never paid off small debts."

"...I had already spent my adolescence in a world I shared with myself, the occasional friend or boyfriends, and my journals. Robert told me while we were living together that he had also felt alone since childhood, and I think that was one of the things that most endeared him to me."

"I loved sniffing my hands after I washed them for dinner, to prove to myself over and over that the smell of the paint was ineradicable. It really was. You couldn't wash it off with any kind of soap. I sniffed my hands during other classes and looked at the paint that clung to my fingernails if I didn't keep them safely clean, as Robert instructed us. I smelled my hands on my pillow when I went to sleep.... No scent could mask or even overtake that pungent, oily odor, which was mixed every day on my skin with the equally sharp smell of the turpentine that didn't quite get the paint off. This pleasure of smell was second for me only to the pleasure of applying the paint to the canvas."

"Once in a while I find myself flipping through my card file, in actuality or just mentally, searching for that important painting for which I have no card."
That last quote is particularly true for me. Sometimes my quest for beauty has me flipping through my mind, scanning the internet, going to galleries, creating and destroying. I will say Kostova knows a whole lot more about art/the artistic temperament than she does technical/ethical aspects of being a mental health professional. To me, it was worth reading just for her character development and story construction.