The Last Irascible

 an early self-portrait, circa 1938-40

There's a wonderful story about the artist Hedda Sterne in the New York Review of Books.  She is 100 years old this year. An early Abstract Expressionist, except that she wasn't. Hedda Sterne made art the way she wanted to and watched her then-husband Saul Steinberg become famous. She kept working. The marriage ended without rancor in the 1960s. She kept working. As she aged, her eyesight began to fail. She kept working. In 2004, she had a stroke. She kept working.

When I was young, I tried very hard. I wept every day in the studio because there was such a distance between what I wanted to do and what came out. Now I’m at peace, because of old age. It flows calmly now. I meditate for a long time. I work against ego. I think ego is an obnoxious bother. To a great extent I have lost all interest in this fiction, Hedda Sterne.

Go read this and be inspired. Read another interview from 1992 with Hedda Sterne here. Find out more about her work here.