Bad Paintings

On that level it was interesting, the conclusion seemed to be that a large part of the character was born from the relationship Stroker had with his employer, Henry Irving, the most famous actor of his day. Stroker managed his theatre in London, and was his general dogs-body. Much under appreciated and worked to the point of exhaustion, Stroker still found the time to hammer away at his writing. Three mediocre novels later, he started on Dracula. After Dracula, another few poor sibling novels followed, which I would guess are no longer in print, having been lucky to be printed at all according to the documentary.

The obvious lesson in all of this would be to say that we all produce poor work from time to time, for the majority; the poor work could be the rule rather than the exception. It could also be reasonably argued that this was the case with Bram Stroker. The other point is, he kept at it. Dracula was written on hotel pads, library papers, backs of cigar boxes, he wrote whenever he got a chance. He was a driven man in every sense of the word and did not live to enjoy the fame or notoriety that his creation would have earned him today. He could be described as the VanGogh of the literary world.

If you were promised that for every fifty paintings you paint, five of them were going to absolute knockouts. Those five were going to be the kind of work you normally could only dream of producing. The color, the forms, the ideas comes together in one unified whole, that leave the impression that some force of nature just picked up the canvas, took it home with them, and dropped it back complete on your easel the following morning. Would you think that would be a fair trade?

The reality is that nobody (or thing) is going to make this promise to you but more than likely it is going to be the case, just from common sense if nothing else. The paradox being that like Stoker you might think that your best work is every other novel, except that one with the blood sucking character with the penchant for dark clothes. So don’t burn those old paintings yet, you might be sitting on a fortune, which, if not you, at least your kids can enjoy.

As for our friend Bram, he stayed loyal to his artistic calling, right to the end. A good example to us all of the virtue of dogged perseverance.