A month away from launching ART ABOVE EVERYTHING, it feels time to share the genesis of my book’s subject: Art monks.
Eighteen years ago, I did a series of writing residencies in a Catholic house of prayer in South Texas that required guests to take a vow of silence for the duration of their stay. Two canonized hermits lived on the premises. It mystified me, how they spent almost the entirety of their days in their cabins, praying for the souls of the world. Gradually, though, it occurred to me that my own devotional act of writing 12 hours a day in my own cabin wasn’t terribly far removed. Just as those hermits had taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to better serve God, I had renounced a 401K and a potential spouse to serve a muse that required its own form of obedience. Reading up on the (wild!) history of desert hermits in the onsite library, I found an even more intriguing commonality: ecstatic experience. They reached their exalted state through the extreme connections forged in prayer; I, through the communal joy that arises in performance. That’s when I first started thinking of myself as an “art monk.” Upon finding myself single and childless on my 40th birthday, I decided that if I was going to keep pursuing this ascetic path, I needed a congregation for company. So, I sent out some queries and invested in plane tickets. ART ABOVE EVERYTHING is the result.
In these last weeks leading up to publication, I’ll be sharing stories of the remarkable women featured in these pages. First up is visual artist Florica Prevenda. At her studio in Bucharest, she shared the devastation of graduating with highest marks from the most prestigious art school in Romania—only to be assigned to work at a provincial clothing factory located a two-hour bus ride away. She survived the last six years of Ceaușescu’s brutal regime by envisioning her canvases waiting back home. She could only create on Sundays, and there was zero chance of showing any work unless it valorized the dictator. Yet, she refused to relinquish her brushes. She painted because she must.
