Julia Cameron’s concept of the shadow artist in The Artist’s Way (1992) refers to someone who desires to be creative but is found servicing artists instead, such as an assistant, critic or teacher. To be a shadow artist, in Julia Cameron’s opinion, can conceal an unacknowledged desire to be creative. It’s often a choice made for sensible reasons: teaching poetry is much more likely to provide an income than writing it. But to completely deny the desire to create and instead play out the impulse vicariously can lead to a bitter life of regret, which might explain why reviewers can be so mean!
For many years, I was most definitely a shadow artist. I taught literature and believed that writing poetry and novels was something other people did, most particularly famous dead men. But my field was feminist cultural studies and my academic research kept turning up women from the past who needed to be rescued from obscurity. Eventually, in rescuing them, I rescued myself.
As I researched and taught courses on women writers and artists of the past, it became more and more difficult to resist their inspiring examples and at midlife I stopped shadowing and started creating. As Billie Jean King memorably said: ‘you have to see it to be it’. This is particularly true for women who have been told in various ways that they can’t be ‘it’. But women have been writing and creating art for centuries—we just have to know where to look.
For me, it was the women of the surrealist art movement of the 1920s and 1930s who captured my imagination. In the early 2000s when I first encountered the rich and alluring work of artists such as Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini and Remedios Varo, the sustained efforts of feminist art historians and curators through the last two decades had meant that their work was becoming better known. Leonora Carrington’s extraordinary life, and evocative work, was particularly inspiring.
So, from my knowledge of the surrealist women artists, I synthesised the plot of a novel. I combined several women’s struggles and triumphs into two main female characters and built a story around them set in the 1930s against the backdrop of the outbreak of war. I borrowed major artworks such as Meret Oppenheim’s notorious teacup covered in fur and retold the experience of the iconic 1938 surrealist exhibition in Paris (which featured a street of mannequins designed to represent female prostitutes) from a woman’s perspective.
I was determined that my women characters would be centre-stage and although they are championed and adored by the men of surrealism it is the bond of friendship between the two of them that pulls them through. This is based on the truth. Whitney Chadwick’s book Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (1985) put women onto the surrealist map, and her more recent book The Militant Muse (2017) demonstrates that it was the women’s friendship networks that sustained them through exile, war and disappointment.
To write Swimming with Tigers was to reclaim a tradition of lost women artists but it was also to reclaim my own creative ambition. I’ve seen this happen so many times: one artist’s liberation inspires another to make the jump from shadow artist to working, creating artist. I hope that my novel will do the same and that the surrealist women’s lives and work, as portrayed in my novel, will inspire someone else to step out of the shadows.
This article first appeared on Women Writers Women’s Books on 15/10/2024 and is republished by kind permission of Barbara Bos.
A fascinating insight into what drives creativity. The importance of self-belief and stepping into the light. The power of friendship and solidarity. A great article that throws light on a novel that delivers on all fronts. Thankyou.