Daybook The Journal of an Artist

A “touchstone for aspiring artists and writers” (Megan O’Grady, The New Yorker), Daybook is a classic work about reconciling the call of creative work with the demands of daily life.

Renowned American artist Anne Truitt kept this illuminating and inspiring journal over a period of seven years, determined to come to terms with the forces that shaped her art and life. Her range of sensitivity—moral, intellectual, sensual, emotional, and spiritual— is remarkably broad. She recalls her childhood on the eastern shore of Maryland, her career change from psychology to art, and her path to a sculptural practice that would “set color free in three dimensions.” She reflects on the generous advice of other artists, watches her own daughters’ journey into motherhood, meditates on criticism and solitude, and struggles to find the way to express her vision. Resonant and true, encouraging and revelatory, Anne Truitt guides herself—and her readers—through a life in which domestic activities and the needs of children and friends are constantly juxtaposed against the world of color and abstract geometry to which she is drawn in her art.

Beautifully written and a rare window on the workings of a creative mind, Daybook showcases an extraordinary artist whose insights generously and succinctly illuminate the artistic process.

Anne Truitt [1921-2004] had her first solo exhibition at the André Emmerich Gallery in New York in 1963. Her work is in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC; the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The recipient of many grants, she was the director of the artists’ colony Yaddo for several years in the early 1990s. Today the Estate of Anne Truitt is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery.

Audrey Niffenegger is a writer and visual artist who lives in Chicago and London. She has published two novels, The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, and many illustrated books including The Night Bookmobile and Raven Girl. She is currently at work on The Other Husband, a sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife, which is being made into an HBO series by Steven Moffat.