I wasn't an academic looking in books for ideas. But I educated myself about historical work that was similar to mine, to provide a frame of reference that wasn't the usual frame of reference of the New York art world and Europe.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Believe it or not, there were very few books on art, years ago.
Art needs to be socialised, and you need a lot of context to understand that, and that doesn't mean having read a few art history books.
I'm not as much a history person as an art person, but I mean, you can read history through art.
For novelists, the imagination is everything. The trick is to guide one's imagination using research. I love using old maps. When I wrote my novels on London and New York, I found wonderful historical atlases. Paris has the most lavish maps of all.
I think whatever art form you're in, whether TV, film or theater, you should know the history of who came before you and how the art form has changed or not changed and to learn from the greats.
I've always been drawn to historical fiction.
In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute.
My work since the late '80s specifically questioned what was presented as the 'natural' order of things in the history of post-war-N.Y. painting.
One of my favorite ways to find fictional inspiration, by the way, is to browse historical timelines. I also like world atlases - any country with a squiggly coastline seems to inspire me, as do visual dictionaries, those reclusive creatures of the reference shelf.
I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.