It is my experience that most people in the arts feel a kind of comfort in lacking worldly success. They fight for it, and suffer over it, but it is so much safer not to have it—safer from envy, judgment, exposure; from the dangers attendant on superseding parents or companions—that, either through the work itself or by way of fumbling encounters with the world, they ensure it won’t happen. But this doesn’t seem true of my father. I think he naïvely, to the end, possibly through arrogance, expected the work to be its own ambassador. It had once been enough.
Source : My Father’s Art
