Philistines abound; avoid their cheap advice at all costs

The Horse Fair by Rosa Bonheur (1852) (Wiki Commons) This picture is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of New York: I spent hours of my youth sitting entranced before it, and knowing the story of Rosa Bonheur who refused to do needlework to become a painter instead.

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I'm fairly certain I'm a feminist. I don't, however, think I would call myself a feminist; I think I would call myself a progressive pragmatic humanist. Which means? That I believe in humanist ideals for all people, including women, but we are not there yet. Feminism implies too much of an Us v. Them mentality for my taste. And I believe that the entire world will benefit when the entire world is equally valued, equally paid and when the innate characteristics of all sorts of people are equally valued.

This morning, viewing a slide show that accompanied the story "23 things every woman should stop doing," on Huffington Post, I noticed they had recommended the book Get To Work...And Get A Life, Before It's Too Late by Linda R. Hirshman.

Included in Hirshman's "strategic plan for women" was the following advice: "don't study art."

I am appalled. What was this woman thinking? Or not thinking. Is it really better to become an accountant for the potential of big money when your heart says to be a painter? Will one, in fact, make big money if one's heart is not in it? And if one does make a relative fortune despite a lukewarm attitude toward the work itself, what happens after 40 years of that? Does one then curl up and die immediately of regret, having beaten one's muse into an early grave? Maybe trading passion for the pocketbook explains all the sour old bats one meets. 

Some of us go ahead and paint--forty years later--because we have a nest egg or a working spouse and don't need to scrimp and save through retirement. But some, having squandered their youth and strength rushing down paths they really dislike, are simply locked out, unable to raise either the blood pressure or financing to follow their passion, their dream. 

How sad. I can tell you first-hand that living a life for a paycheck--even a paycheck achieved by relatively satisfying work--is no substitute for expressing the life one wants, regardless of the size of the paycheck. Waiting 40 years to do what one loves is damaging, not only to one's soul, but to the world deprived of whatever in one's heart was yearning to be free.

A Baby Boomer searches for life

My first love was theatre. But my father talked me out of studying it at university, or maybe it's more as if he was so frightened that I'd get ahead by lying down, as it were, that his disapproval of the whole idea influenced me. So I decided I would be a writer instead. It never occurred to me, not even at university, that I could work in theatre without being an actress which did, in fact, bore me to tears. I loathed learning lines, and if there was ever a show I was in during my youth in which I didn't do a bit of improv because I hadn't learned my lines, I don't know about it.

So, writing then. I went to journalism grad school. I became a journalist, a pretty good one. I made a good living for 35 years or so. But I was never, ever happy about it. Firstly,

I'm an introvert, and it took a bit of self-flagellation to get me to pick up the phone. Eventually, though, I got stuck in and had quite a bit of fun asking politicians questions they didn't like, even face to face. One of my favorite moments was asking one such question of the Secretary of State of the state of Tennessee; he saw a female journalist and expected fluff. HAH! The look on his face was almost worth the price of admission.

Maybe that's what kept me at it, the fact that I was having a good time making a decent living in what is still, I hasten to add, a man's world. It is the rare female journalist who gets the kudos. But I digress.

Following yet ANOTHER wrong path

Several years into that career, my need to express demanded to be let out of its cage. I started by going to the New York School of Interior Design. I like nice houses. I thought if I did that, it would be a REAL profession, with real money...etc. And a chance to...dare I believe it?...dabble in art. Of course, the fact that I aced the colour course without actually waking up and the instructor was a horrific witch and endured the chatter of dingbats throughout the period furniture lectures...well, it was a non-starter.

Finally, I gave in. I went to the Art Students League of New York for real lessons in real drawing and painting with real instructors, so real that they had to be working artists, well represented, even to teach there. 

And I never looked back.

I loved art school. I really did. So many interesting people, aside from the chance to actually learn how it's done. But I failed again to switch horses. I made a small attempt when I lived in Florida to start a gallery for my own work and a friend's, a former architect who had become a watercolourist in his retirement. But I depended on my freelance writing income to support it...and a major client went belly up. End of experiment.

Hard to get stuck in when one has been dulled for 40 years...

So...here it is...I am retired from journalism, though you'd never know it to see my byline all over the place, but now I write only what I want, not only what is paid for as I did before.

I'm having a hard time getting stuck into a career in art; my career should be over, after all. I should be doing nothing but what I want and traveling. I've paid the piper, paid my dues in several wrong professions. I'm getting, well, old if the truth be told. (Reference the line above about raising the blood pressure and the cash to finally paint, sculpt or whatever later in life.)

Still, I have begun doing what I want. I am painting, although the usual socially/culturally influenced negativity that afflicts most women puts the brakes on my forward movement more often than I would like. (Must work on that.)

But worse, I spent an entire life denying myself what I wanted to do: art. Theatre, art, or even writing poetry (something else that seems to have taken on its own life all of a sudden.) I was a journeyman journalist making a good income writing about stuff that seemed to be useful, and that sometimes I even enjoyed, for instance, the years when I was a theatre reviewer. But it didn't feed my soul. It fed my horse, and my horse fed my soul. But then, I view riding a horse over fences as kinetic art; indeed, that's exactly what I was doing, and doing well when I managed to win a ribbon.

All this chequered past makes it all the harder to begin now, knowing I cannot in this lifetime achieve the mastery of a Rembrandt, the temporal fame of a Basquiat or Hockney, the money of a Warhol.

I would like to meet Linda R. Hirshman and possibly punch her right in the nose. How dare she tell women not to pursue their passion! How dare she assume for others that having work that pays well is all a good life is about. I think money is the least a good life is about. I'd tell her to get a life before it's too late, but I doubt she'd hear me. Apparently, the demands of a dying culture are sufficient for her: work, save, put off anything that makes your soul sing. Get a life, you know, one of those cookie-cutter things one can find on TV.

It's bullshit, her statement. And it needs to be put in a paper bag and set afire on her front steps so she gets the full benefit of the stench of her soul-deadening plan for women. I've got a few choice words for the editors of HuffPo, as well.

 

How do you spell that?

Finally.

Finallyfinallyfinallyfinallyfinally.

When one is getting over an illness, one does first that which comes most naturally. When it is a malady of the soul caused by the logistics of life (that is, having houseguests all summer, which is not conducive to artsy thinking or doing), then one works one's way back by doing that for which the muscles of body or soul or both are most easily resurrected.

In my case, it was writing, and particularly, it was writing journalism, columns on the vicissitudes of modern life. I was a journalist for 40 years, after all, and only a part-time artist and equestrienne during that time.

So I dumped a tirade about the reprehensible current mayor of my birthplace (Michael Bloomberg of NYC) into cyberspace. Ah. Felt pretty good. (It would feel better to write a paean to the late Ed Koch, the best mayor of NYC there ever was...but the subject isn't "sexy." No one suffered, as New Yorkers are suffering now.)

Today, finally, a poem escaped me. It needed to. And it meant I had at least partly processed the upsetting events of last week, horrific environmental damage on a small scale by a truly reprehensible old geezer who lives next door and destroyed our common hedgerow.

And I worked a bit on two paintings.

I am turning a portrait of my dog into a primitive.

And, I have begun a painting of two dogs who frequent a pub in Gwithian and, as it happens, sit on bar stools covered with doggie-paw-print fabric. They are real dogs; I ate lunch with them one day in early spring.

Late discovery

I have suddenly discovered primitives. I do recall having seen a gallery devoted to Naifs in Paris 35 years ago. As I recall, the palette of most artists shown was either blue or green. And there were a lot of cats.

But I couldn't recall seeing many more naive paintings until I picked up a book including works by members of The Association of British Naive Artists during a visit to Penlee House, Penzance, last summer.

And then I recalled--doh!--a piece in my own collection. A small painting, about 6 inches by 9 inches, that I bought in Paris about 35 years ago, give or take. Possibly on the same visit in which I saw the gallery, possibly not. Back then, I went to Paris whenever the spirit moved me AND I had the wherewithal at the same time. It didn't happen all that often, not half often enough.

Anyway, I carried the little painting around unframed for a while, quite a while, while I ended a marriage and made a couple of long-distance moves. Plus, I had a horse to buy; I couldn't afford framing. But eventually, the little painting got framed. And since then, it has always hung in my kitchen. Not the ideal place for a painting, I suspect, but it is done in acrylics, so probably a bit less difficult to ruin than oils.

And I love it. Not for the subject matter. Not for the colour. Not for the style. Not for the artist whose name I haven't the foggiest idea of, although I recall he was a big guy, didn't speak much, and had hung his paintings on the fence around a church on Boulevard St. Germain. And I think I paid about 15 bucks for it, at whatever American money was exchanging for with francs back then.

What I love about it is this: Charcuterie is misspelled as Charcutrie.

Despite my almost obsessional demand that English should be written correctly, whether English English, American English or even pidgin English, all according to its own rules, the fact that charcuterie was misspelled said something to me.

It said that art was art and didn't really need to represent anything in a standard manner. Probably, the artist was simply a lousy speller. Why not? He was studying art, not French....if he was French. Maybe he wasn't. Maybe that's why he didn't speak much, because we tourists wouldn't want to buy art on the street in Paris created by an English guy, or a German or Italian or even an American in Paris, no matter how cheap the art or how charming the art or the artist. Maybe he was a foreigner and that's why he misspelled that common French word.

A feast of possibilities

So, there it hangs in my kitchen among the pots and pans reminding me as I create our meals that I can create other stuff, too. Stuff that doesn't depend on years and years of study, as my journalism and horse-showing lives did. I did study art, though, because that's the way I'm made, with a penchant to find out HOW things are done and to have the best instruction I can find. But I think, now, I might forget those studies, the magic of Robert Beverly Hale's anatomical drawing instruction et al, and do a little naif painting myself. It's happy, and lord knows happy would be good both in the big world and my little one at the moment.

But I don't think I'll have a green or blue palette; so far, both paintings seem to be a little red- and orange-heavy...but who knows? I still do love oils far more than acrylics. So, after a little waiting, and I can paint over it, change the palette if I feel like it, and maybe even misspell a common Englesh wurd.

This is your creativity; This is your creativity in cyberspace...

 (Wiki commons)

This is your brain. Note how neat it is, and how each area and its function are identified. This is a nice brain.

 

(Wiki commons) 

This is your brain after five days of doing computer things. Building websites for your work. Endlessly inputting meta tags and other garbage. Indeed, this IS garbage. No, your brain. No, garbage.....

 

This is all by way of explanation for my absence from the blogosphere recently. But today, finally, I finished a sales page that will go live on Monday. Which means that I can get back to painting. Which means that I can get back to writing about painting...or even writing about writing.

ANYTHING EXCEPT ENTERING THE SAME INFORMATION OVER AND OVER AGAIN TO SATISFY THE REQUIREMENTS OF CAFEPRESS. It is deadly; it is the perfect task for George W. Bush. He might have been up to that; he certainly wasn't up to governing the United States. And if he went on endless vacations, as he did, who would care? One would need only to get another smirking chimp to do the input tasks.

But I digress. I never really saw the need for artists' and writers' retreats before. I do now. After a week of cybercrapola, I need to retreat, into a world where meaningful things exist. Birds. Clouds. Movement. Sounds of nature. Sounds of human life. Interaction. At least two brain cells that are working well enough to communicate with each other and possibly create something...a thought, a picture, an object, even a swell dinner from scratch.

I'm cleaning out the garbage tonight. I'm having a change of scene, and I'm not going to waste the rebirth of my creative juices by cooking. We are going to our favorite Devon restaurant, Steps of Tavistock, a place that's so homey*, it could be home. The fact that the woman owner, Suzanne Oldfield, is a former American and her husband, Adrian Oldfield (the chef) is British--thereby offering precisely the same combination as my husband and I do--has nothing to do with it.

What has something to do with it is that it the atmosphere will be both restful and friendly, and the food excellent and well-prepared. The background music is either classical or post-big-band jazz, either of which let one's mind wander in gentle ways. 

Steps restaurant is familiar, indeed, it is almost genetic. Simon's late father, Ronald, went there once or twice a week for a good meal and some company after Simon's mother had died and Ronald had moved into town, diagonally across the street, in fact, from the restaurant. We lived in that flat for a year before we bought a house; great location, great flat. It retained the vibes of Ronald, a gentle man who actually wrote letters to his wife from their cat--in Cockney--when she was in the hospital giving birth to Simon. They used to keep mother and baby for a week back then, even when all was well as it was in her case.

I know what I'm having tonight: Adrian's fantastic green salad, perfectly dressed. The shallow fried crab cakes or maybe the sea bass, with sauteed potatoes. Adrian Oldfield is an artist with those potatoes. They are so perfect, so delicious that I could be perfectly happy with those alone. A bottle of Belle Muraille, a red wine, not expensive, but a favorite of Suzanne Oldfield, and us. And very probably the creme brulee.

See, I told you it was homey. In the perfection of its homey-ness, it is high art. In the perfection and consistency of Adrian's traditional Cordon Bleu British cuisine, there is high art. In Suzanne's running of the front of the house, there is high art. But it is comfortable art, precisely the kind that will salve the misuse of a creative brain so that it can begin again to find some new and interesting things about its own creative world, in my case, painting and writing.

* I must persist in the American usage. The British usage would be homeliness, but in the US that means ugly...and I can't gt past it. Mea culpa.