About Being Bored

I do not understand boredom. I have trouble fitting my life into the time allotted to me.

On the day to day there is everything I want to do, everything I think I should or need to do, and then what gets in the way, what finally gets done and trying to find the parenthesis in which to rest or escape. And afterwards moving on to whatever comes next.

On the life scale (as opposed to the day to day), there is: have I really seen, heard, tasted, experienced, all that was available to me? Will I die having missed something critical to the experience of life itself?  Have I done what I could with the gifts I was given, meager or bountiful?  

A life was given to me. I have raced through it responding to each scenario as it presented itself or that I had myself created. Was I ever or never aware of the bigger picture? The big picture being that a great deal was provided to me to savor, to delight in, to love or to just be aware of - did I take it all in? Did I use this life, live it fully? 

I fear that I was often too focused on the moment, on the laundry, the book, the work or even on the people, to be mindful of how short the moment of this light.

Today I filled out a form giving power of attorney to others in case the situation arose in which I could not make health care decisions for myself. My MD told me that an old one he had needed to be replaced by a fresher version. Same thing, different date.

Being dead must be very boring.

The image above is a new "Little House". I plan to make several versions of little houses to celebrate the little house that is my new home. I will give them prime space in the soon-to-be-finished studio when I open it for our open studio event in June.

About Getting Ready

I am usually good at staying in touch with the people who warm my world. This last month and a half I have been operating at fever pitch to get finished with all the organizing that seems to need doing so that I can feel free to paint. This blog has been my main link to others except for an occasional phone call or even less frequently, an outing.

The new studio should be ready at the end of the month. The tasks and chores and obligations that distract from the work will not come to a sudden halt at that point. I will still need to do laundry, some cooking and if I don’t want to become a total nut-case, keep my connections to friends and family alive and well. When I had a job and four small children and a big house, a husband straight out of the middle ages and an active social life, I managed it all. Not always easy, but definitely doable. Of course I was younger then. But that’s not where the difference lies. Back then I could give short shrift to any of the above mentioned pursuits. (Here I have to stop to beg forgiveness of my children for the times they didn’t get the attention they needed.) But racing through a painting is not advisable. The results are bound to be garbage-like. One needs to be focused, to have no thoughts of anything other than the work at hand. And how to get to that state of complete absorption in the process? Well, for me it means feeling that everything in my life is in place physically or otherwise or, if that is not possible, then there is a plan in place to cover all eventualities. Some of the basics however, cannot be ignored. There must be food in the frig and if any essential appliance is not working, calls will be made before work is started. If someone I am close to is in dire straits, not possible to turn a blind eye to, that will get attention. But usually, anything that can be postponed will get noted on a list (to be sure that I won’t forget it), and I go into the studio, lock the door and let the world happen without me.

I have tried not to think about the work. I've kept busy getting the house in order and it's now as good as it's going to get. For a while, anyway. Tonight I will spend some time over drinks with some friends I have missed. Life is moving back to what I want it to be. Oh, joy!

The images above are of the studio space, then and now. It's going to be magnificent. I plan to be ready, come hell or high water, for our county-wide open studio event in June, along with many other of the artists who ply their trade in this lovely piece of our world. 

About Life Interrupted

I’ve been getting organized. Since moving a little more than a month ago, that has been my priority. The plan is to get the house in order: functional, comfortable and presentable. Then I can go to my new studio and know that when my workday ends, I’ll have that place to take refuge in. 

In this time before the studio renovation is completed, I plan also to get some new prints made for the June’s open studio event. I hope too, to work on daughter Barbara’s wedding photo album, a long overdue project which has great appeal.

So I think: I’ll get up at an early hour, do the usual morning (coffee, newspaper, exercise video every other day, check email) and then get to the tasks that await. There are no boxes left to unpack but there’s some fine tuning to do. The room that I have made into my office (obviously intended to be the living room of this little house) needs for my desk to become uncluttered and my worktable to become work-friendly. The computer and peripherals are on a third table already perfectly set up thanks to my youngest daughter who is fast and efficient. (We’ve been calling her the “Energizer Bunny” since the move.) The room that I have designated as my “sitting room” is one of the two bedrooms. It is waiting to be outfitted with something to sit on. That will happen in a few weeks and has been a delightful project. The closets need some ordering which shouldn’t be too hard now that I have rid myself of lots of excess in worldly goods. Then on to the prints and the album.

Ah, but as often happens to well-laid plans, disruption ensues. It takes the form of an invitation I might regret to refuse - to dinner prepared by the daughters who have become the cake and pizza queens, or to join them and friends for drinks, or some other temptation to leave work undone. Daytime interruptions are about dentist, haircut, medical check-up, grocery shopping, maybe something from the hardware store. Woe is me. Life gets in the way of my intended orderly and productive operation.

For those who think it admirable that I honor my commitment to write this blog every week, I say this: while I rarely want to get started, once I do, it is a very pleasurable job. After all, I’m talking about myself, about my life. 

Writer Daphne du Maurier said it in few words: “All autobiography is self-indulgent.”

The  mess in the photo above is the present state of my studio-in-progress. All the windows but one have been covered as I need the walls to work on. I use daylight fluorescents for lighting and prefer them to natural light for their consistency and reliability. The exhaust fan is about my occasional use of sprays for pastel which can be a threat to the brain. Don’t need any of that.

About What It Takes

I got a free subscription to Architectural Digest some time ago and have reveled in taking pictorial tours through what must be some the most amazingly luxurious and exquisitely put together homes on the planet. The last issue I submerged in covered the homes of several celebrities: an actress, a musician and a designer. All names familiar to most households. I suppose that the attraction of a magazine like this is that it supplies the information you need to stage the backgrounds for your fantasies. Or maybe the decor itself is the fantasy. Or maybe you don’t fantasize. Whatever.

I had an epiphany when remembering some those rooms afterwards. Of my five (or more?) senses, the one that has brought me to my knees in emotional response is sight. I think in pictures and use pictures to think. This is not a very efficient nor is it always an effective operation, but — it’s what I have to work with. I would take great delight in being lodged in some of those impeccably put together rooms or baking in one of those designer kitchens outfitted with every utensil the heart could crave. Imagine a closet you could skateboard in that held shoes in careful rows and beautiful clothing for lavish affairs. And more. Much more. Ah, the comfort. Ah, the pleasure I would know in these lovely surroundings!

But could I be happier than I am now? Of course not. I believe that we have a certain capacity for feeling anything. I suppose when you go beyond your capacity for feeling physical pain, you pass out. And when emotional pain is too great, the brain has its ways. Must be the same for contentment. And right now, not only does my life feel complete, everything in place, but I can’t imagine being more content than I am.

I just made myself smile when I typed “everything in place”. The house has still not been put in order after the move and the studio has only just begun to be renovated. It has already run into its own set of complications and stumbling blocks. But my children are well, there’s food in the frig, and I am in good health. I am supported by friends and family. I look forward to the day when I will be back at work and have my neatly ordered little house  to come back to in the evenings. It couldn’t get any better then that.

Actress Jodie Foster: I fantasize about having a manual job where I can come home at night, read a book and not feel responsible for what will happen the next day. 

The image above is Santander ©2004, mixed media on paper, 36” x 48”. It is part of a series that was a temporary detour into a more decorative style inspired by Islamic design.

About The Requisite Sufffering

I kind of live with a book while I am reading it and often do so for some time afterwards. The tome of the moment as I mentioned last week is a biography of painter Joan Mitchell. There’s an account of a phase in her adolescence when she pretended to be of an impoverished family (quite the reverse of her reality) as she believed that was a necessary requisite to being an artist. There was a time when she dressed in clothes so ragged that she inspired pity from her schoolmates. And then there is that myth about artist needing to suffer so that they can feel deeply enough to produce “meaningful” works.

It has been demonstrated that suffering is not a natural outcome of poverty. Poor populations do as well (sometimes better) than more affluent ones when surveyed to measure how content they were with their lives. Mitchell never wanted for anything that money could buy. She had charge accounts at fine stores paid by her father even as a teenager. She was, however, not a happy youngster.

Suffering is not usually about money. It is about some of the difficult “givens” of our lives. Given to us also is the capacity for joy and pleasure. Art is about all of it. Ordinary lives often beget extraordinary art.  And suffering (if it were to be considered a critical component of the creative life) is universal. No matter who you are, what you have, or where you have been, you are not protected. You are not exempt from the early onset of a fatal disease, a debilitating or fatal accident, or the loss of people dear to you. Those are the devils we live with and deal with, or not, in whatever ways suit us. 

George Clooney: The idea that every time you do a film you're supposed to be tortured confuses me. I mean, guys who say, 'Oh, it's really tough, my character is really suffering' -come on. For us, even in the rotten ones we've had a good time. I don't think you have to suffer.

The image above is like those of the last weeks: some of the collage material that I put together on my computer. It is part of what I will be doing while I wait to have a complete studio again. And, by the way, the renovation begins on Monday.

About Nostalgia

I’m not sure that’s the word for it. It is a deep sense of loss with some sadness attached to it. For a time, a place and for the people that were part of it. We were young and kind of confused. Maybe that is part and parcel of being eighteen, nineteen and twenty years old. Going to school to study art was, in retrospect, dreamlike. It seemed to become history very quickly and was forever cemented into the core of my life.

Other experiences, the family that was mine until I lost my mother, my twenty-four year marriage, the years when my children were children — they all bring on nostalgia (or whatever the feeling is). But those years at school are somehow more redolent of loss. Some treasure or value that escaped perception while it was happening. Was it that we were too busy with our lives to know that we were young? Or that most of the people who were actors on that stage are gone? Even the school has been transformed: a renovated interior (bless them for leaving the outside of the structure intact). There’s a second building now and even a dormitory building. And, of course, the El is gone.

A few years ago as I rode down in the elevator (pity they changed that wonderful old elevator car*), there was a student riding with me. I said: “Good school, huh?” He said with seriousness: “Oh, yes!”. I was glad to know that the appreciation is still intact. The education has been tuition free since the beginning. The school has now run into financial difficulties so that may soon change.

I know why it is with me now. I am reading a biography of painter Joan Mitchell. When she lived and worked in NYC she was on Tenth Street on the east side at the time the elevated train ran close and noisily by on Third Avenue. She was in her thirties then and I was at school on Eighth Street and my first real love was on Tenth. The first housing of the Whitney Museum was down the street; this was in the fifties and abstract expressionism was in full bloom. It is only now, so many years later, that I know where I was then. So young and so absorbed by it all, I wasn’t able to stand back to look at where I was and what was happening. I suppose we never get the full picture of any piece of our lives until we gain some distance and look back with less involvement in the details.

*From a NYTimes article: COOPER UNION -- At the time Otis was perfecting his safety elevator, Peter Cooper was making plans for an academy on Astor Place. Cooper was smart enough to know that elevators were in the future, but he was a little too smart for his own good. Having calculated that a cylinder would hold more passengers than a cube, and so would naturally be the cab shape of the future, he put a cylindrical shaft into his building.

His geometry may have been right but his assumption was wrong, and for more than 100 years a box-shaped cab ran in Cooper's shaft, a square peg in a round hole.

Actress Jeanne Moreau: My life is very exciting now. Nostalgia for what? It's like climbing a staircase. I'm on the top of the staircase, I look behind and see the steps. That's where I was. We're here right now. Tomorrow, we'll be someplace else. So why nostalgia? 

About Validation

Do we know if we’re funny or smart or appropriate if we are not bouncing off another person? Doesn’t most of our sense of who we are and how we fit into our world depend greatly on how others respond to us? A salary, being fairly paid for our labor is warranted reward. Being told you look good is better than your mirror. Being remembered on your birthday, very pleasant. Receiving a grant is validation with cash; how nice! 

Long ago I read an interview with Eva Hesse, the German painter who died young in New York City in 1970. She said something about being strengthened by the attention she received. Art critic Arthur Danto mentioned she always felt she was fighting for recognition in a male dominated art world. That was back in the sixties but given the self-doubt she suffered I imagine it would not have been much different at a later time. I am sure that every pat on the back that came her way was much appreciated.

Another long ago article that I clipped told of how winning an Oscar helps you to live longer. Evidently an average of four more years. Hmm…that wasn’t cosmetic surgery? The writer goes on to say multiple winners average about six years longer than their peers. He quotes Dr. Donald Redelmeier of the University of Toronto: “Once you get the Oscar, it gives you an inner sense of peace and accomplishment that can last your entire life. That alters the way your body deals with stress.”

Now since most of us are more likely to watch the Oscar event this month than we are to win one, we need to find our validation through other routes. After all, we don’t want to miss out on the possibility of adding a few more years to our stay. Something I have done a couple of times is call my own phone number while I’m out and leave a warm message for myself. Fun to do but I doubt it will increase my longevity. The experience of exhibiting paintings is a two edged sword. The admiring comments that come from friends and family are great, we want their support, but there could be some bias there. While it might sound crass, the most gratifying response comes from making sales. If somebody likes your work enough to want to pay for it and live with it, that’s very real validation.  And when there are no sales it doesn’t matter much that the previous show sold out. The success needs to happen with some constancy. Whereas winning an Oscar or two seems to suffice.

From Joseph Campbell: “Any life career that you choose in following your bliss should be chosen with that sense – that nobody can frighten me off this thing. And no matter what happens, this is the validation of my life and action.”

The image above is like the one of last week of some of the collage material that I put together on my computer. It is part of what I will be doing while I wait to have a complete studio again.