andy merrifield

Featured image is “Painting Beyond Lines,” taken from the cover of my new book, The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love (Verso, May 2017):

“The straight line is a simple succession of notes, the same notes. It’s unmusical. But Laurence Sterne sketches the wavering human line: coiled and curvaceous, whimsical and musical, arabesque and affecting, just like life itself. The rhythm of life and of consciousness is digressive and discontinuous, looping and lolloping, reflecting life’s mishaps and jolts, its bumps and fidgets. In one vignette from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Corporal Trim, praising the trail of the free person, flourishes his walking stick, whirling it haphazardly through the air, around and around. Sterne even draws this squiggly line for us all to vividly see, just in case we can’t imagine it in our heads, or follow it in our lives. It’s a dancing trajectory that defies the spirit of calculation, denies life as logical induction, refuses to go straight for the goal, without detours or delays – the Ivy League way, the ‘successful’ professional way.”

— Andy Merrifield, from “Hobby-Horse,” Chapter 8 of The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love (Verso, 2017)