Varda, the Master Builder

The artist and his surroundings

Miller’s subject is Jean, or Yanko, Varda, the artist whose hospitality and way of living impressed him as much as his pictures. The portrait belongs to Miller’s recurring search for people who make a creative life possible within an inhospitable society.

The title’s builder is not simply an architect with a list of commissions. Miller attends to the making of an environment: space, company, work, and the pleasure of welcoming visitors. The artist’s life becomes part of what Miller wants readers to notice.

A portrait from the early California years

Varda met Miller in California in 1943 and encouraged his interest in the coast. The essay appeared in the Berkeley magazine Circle before its separate 1947 publication. This chronology is important: it precedes Varda’s later residence on the Vallejo ferryboat in Sausalito.

Later stories about the boat and its celebrated visitors should not be inserted into this earlier essay as though Miller had already witnessed them. The work records an earlier encounter with Varda, even though the artist’s subsequent life made its emphasis on hospitality seem particularly apt.

Tribute rather than detached criticism

The essay is an act of admiration. Miller treats Varda as someone whose example might restore other people’s appetite for making things. That purpose differs from a critical catalogue comparing periods of an artist’s work or evaluating each exhibited picture.

The separate book and its appearance in Remember to Remember connect the portrait with Miller’s other accounts of creative friends. The Amazing and Invariable Beauford Delaney makes a useful companion: each gives an artist’s personality a central place, while remaining Miller’s partial and affectionate view of another person.

In a passage reproduced by Sarah Poisner, Miller praises Varda for seeing possibilities in his friends that others overlook. He describes this attention as light: even an inconspicuous person or animal can reflect Varda's faith and enthusiasm. The image makes his artistry a way of looking at others, not just a capacity to produce pictures. It also reveals how the praise works. The brightness belongs first to Varda, and those around him become its reflections. Within this passage, celebrating other people's potential is also a way of magnifying the exceptional friend at the center of the tribute.