Art and the Artist

The novel explores the individual’s prerogative to make art by depicting a series of artists working in various media. All of these artists are referred to by the initial G. By giving all of the artists the same moniker, the author is equalizing them on the page. At the same time, all of the artists have distinct identities, backgrounds, and modes of expression. In “The Stuntman,” the male artist G is a painter who is desperate “to make sense of his time and place in history,” and attempts to do so by painting upside down (3). The first person narrator in “The Stuntman” also visits “an exhibition of works by the female sculptor G” (20). The sculptor is known for her “giant cloth forms,” which expose “the violence of gender” (21). In “The Midwife,” a female painter named G attempts to reclaim the wild expressiveness...