No Regrets

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North

With one of my kids, recently grown and flown (Thing1), and the other, starting to contemplate his life outside the nest (Thing2), I find myself thinking more about what might have been if I made different choices.

I used to wish I had made different choices — better choices. 

I am not naïve enough to think of my life is anything other than a journey filled with missteps, redirections, and spectacular mistakes of my own making. Some of those mistakes were due to circumstances I couldn’t control for a long time, but others were simply bad choices.

When I was Thing2’s age and going for college visits, I desperately wanted to go to art school. I let a tough but fair portfolio critique and well-meaning but off-target input from my parents derail further attempts for art school or even a fine art major at a college. 

Even now, however, a conversation with one of the art professors at the school I did briefly attend for another major rings in my head. “You should do this only if you need to paint,“ he said. I needed to paint then and still do. 

If I had been stronger or braver, I would have done more of the type of drawing that would’ve led to getting into those schools. If I had been more sure of myself, and willing to confront my bipolar disorder, (or even realize what it was) I had a younger age, I might have stood my ground and picked the fine art major.

But even as I think about those mistakes, I don’t have regrets. Those mistakes inform the advice I give my kids.

My mistakes eventually brought me back to art. They brought me to teaching, which is one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life even as it is shaped by, and then informed by creativity. Mistakes they brought me to these conversations with my chicks as they are leaving the nest.

Without my mistakes, I wouldn’t have the big guy I married. I wouldn’t have an adult child, who comes home to geek out with me over the latest happenings in Tech. I wouldn’t have a soulful, introspective Thing2 who is a sounding board for his friends, and art critic at large.

It makes me realize that the best advice I can give to my kids is to start making their mistakes as they find and live their truths. 

Hat Season

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Color is Coming, 8”x10”, Oil on Canvas

Monday, less than a week after I got my studio back and functioning, I put on my student hat again as my fall courses started. Tonight, I am putting on my teacher hat to get ready for the in-service days that precede the arrival of middle schoolers into our building. They fit over my flamboyant, feathery artist hat (which sits over a tightly-fitted tinfoil hat that I wear for my mom job), and, as I do with the beginning of every school year or text season in the past, I wonder what will happen to my feathers over the next few months.

Part of getting my studio back was an effort to keep momentum of a year-long painting mentorship. The other part was to create a tangible space in my life for creativity. 

I know that the feathers on my artist hat are long and flexible. They will find their way through the cracks between my teacher and student hats. Even the most tenacious tendrils, however, need air and fluffing on a regular basis. This year – the busiest year yet -makes it even more important to strike a balance between carving out time dedicated to unscripted inspiration and simply integrating it into the other parts of my life. 

Integrating creativity into daily life is vital. It alters your perspective about learning and living. Sometimes that perspective simply helps you find the magic in the mundane and opportunities instead of problems. 

Fusing creative approaches into daily life, however, doesn’t take the place of keeping a sacred space for creating for its own sake. For me, honing in on painting or drawing or writing  — making for the sake of making – is about refining skills, but it’s about something more. It is about meditating on and then escaping from the worries of the day. It is about nurturing something divine that lives in each of us.

Finding the balance between fusing creativity into the everyday and dedicating time and space to making is the foundation of creating and re-creating oneself in to keep up with the job of being fully human. It means finding a way to make all the hats fit and still let the feathers breathe.

Cast of One

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Dead Heads, 8″ x 10″, Oil on Canvas

This was the second of a pair of paintings that upended my outlook on landscapes.

For the past few years I’ve been painting the scenes in Southwestern Vermont and Michigan, and it wasn’t until a conversation with my mentor that I realized that all of those stories featured ensemble casts. Most of my pieces feature the mountains or lake and sky and any elements that add to the drama of a storm or setting sun.

Painting in a small space with rain misting over me for much of the weekend, however, meant that the compelling element in each piece was a cast of one. I started filtering out the noise in the scene and in my head and focused on what mattered.

The last week or so, I’ve been in my studio painting what pops into my head, and the ensemble cast has made a return.

This piece and the one below, however, hang on the wall beyond my easel as to remind me to get out of my head and connect with life and to be compelled.

Trio, 8″x10″, Oil on Canvas

Overcast

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Overcast, 18″x 24″, Oil on Canvas

The punches of color are showing up more frequently along the southern Vermont roadsides, and this painting started as an attempt to keep the glory of late summer early fall in my head.

Instead, on this last weekend, before school and graduate work, begin again, I found myself returning to memories of, soggier fall days. At first, I thought this rainy summer was living rent free in my head, but, I realized the fog had its origins and anxiety about the ability to meet the demands of the coming square and to continue to paint without a mentor and outside schedule defined by work and study.

Too Soon

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Too much rain has brought out the fall colors far too soon. They are just starting to peek through, and it would only have been noticed on a day like today when the sun makes an all too rare appearance for the summer.

The first spots of red and orange always seem to be signs telling us to enjoy time outside and carefree days while we can.

Hill Climb

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This past weekend Manchester/Sunderland, hosted the annual hill climb — a bottom to top tour of the Equinox mountain in Manchester, Vermont. The hitch is that all of the cars doing the climbing are classics, and none of them are equipped with the all wheel drive that is emblematic of most vehicles in our brave little state.

I passed by the classic car convention a few times this weekend, every once in a while, wishing we could take an hour or two to drive to the top (Thing1 climbed it by himself on foot on his 17th birthday). It was a perfect day to be at the top of a 5000+ foot mountain. Puffy, clouds, and the sky is a deep saturated blue these days.

Missing Michigan

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Too many things came up this summer, and we are missing seeing our family along the banks of Lake Michigan. I anticipated missing seeing parents and siblings, but I’m always surprised when I actually miss the violent storms that are a fact of life up there these days.

Increasingly, south western Michigan sees storms coming off the lake that morph into tornadoes. It’s always scary when it happens or is being reported, but it’s also more than a little exciting.

I don’t wish for death the way I did when I was younger. I even fear it a little now, and when the storms come, sometimes threatening life and property and getting hearts pounding with the wind, they are powerful reminders of just how alive we actually are.

Art in Layers

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Roama, 24″x24″, Oil on Canvas
Click here if you would like this painting to live on your wall

I’ve noticed a trend as, trying to find my voice and my style, I’ve painted with a mentor over this last year. The paintings that have been the most satisfying still seem to occur by accident. There’s more intention in the way that I work each day – starting with reckless abandon, trying to find the joy, then looking for the element in the moment that compels me. Very often, however, the paintings I like the best of the ones that emerge through layers of missteps and experiments. The final piece is scarred with evidence of prior experiments and discoveries poking through.

The realization came to me while we were in Rome at the beginning of July. My husband and I, both keenly aware of that Thing1’s impending move to the big city signaled that opportunities for family vacations are dwindling and booked a trip for the four of us. I got off the plane hoping for days of watercolor sketching, but, wandering a city filled with sights that compel you, I struggled to hone in on one thing. 

As we wandered from Imperial ruins to medieval neighborhoods and collections of renaissance art, however, the intense blue of the sky brought the colored stucco into sharp relief. At first I thought the pinks and yellows and oranges were the compelling elements, but, as I sketched the doorway of our apartment, noticing the layers of history between the wall and the cornices, I realized how Rome had cast such a powerful spell. 

It was the same reason that authors written about — the city is always changing and evolving, but the scars of history are never completely erased. A fresh coat of stucco doesn’t completely hide cracks from the layers below or the stonework that forms the original structure of a wall. Medieval timbers may form the ceiling of an apartment with 200 year old windows and conduits for ethernet or electrical cables. 

The city exists in layers, and that is what I ended up painting when we got home.  I had been painting it for months without realizing it, and painting those scars and reminders of all my mistakes and little victories has turned out to be the the best expression of who I am as an artist — and a person.

Walking to First

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Overcast, Oil on Canvas, 14″x14″
Click Here if you would like this painting to live on your wall.

It’s the end of day 7.

This time last week I was voluntarily getting hit by the chemical equivalent of a baseball bat to the inner ear and brain to try and get some of my old life back, and, after a day or two of delayed side effects, did what any batter who gets hit would do. I took the walk.

Now, at the end of day 7, I’m slowly crawling to first base. The fog is starting to clear bit by bit.

I’m heading back to work tomorrow, regardless of the wisdom of that idea. I’ll be sitting on first, waiting for the signal to start running again, but, after the cathartic weekend of painting that preceded the bat to the ear, I know exactly how it will feel.

It won’t be a feverish productivity or blur of activity. It will be when the need to pick up the brush cuts through the spinning fog. It won’t feel like guilt for having neglected work or art. It will feel like a lifeline pulling me in.

What Compels You?

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At the Point, 14″ x 14″, Oil on Canvas

I tried to paint a different spot in that creek the night before, with no success. I knew instantly why it hadn’t worked. I was trying to paint everything all at once, and everything at all at once doesn’t work in any part of my life.

Saturday had been an incredible day of painting in the Pennsylvania countryside with my mentor. Work and an upcoming ear procedure had receded to become a blurry part of another background. I had meditated with the trees and the past their prime daffodils as the clouds chased the sun, and an occasional mist called me off.

Saturday had been a success, because I had stopped to meditate on the trees, intertwining with each other, and taking the time to answer the question, “what compels you?” What part of this part of the natural world compels you to simply stand and exist in the moment, without making plans or replaying conversations where you wish you had said some thing else?

What compels you to just let go?

That was the question.

Sunday morning I struggled to find that focus. The upcoming procedure was closer, and that evening reality would creep in with homework and budgets.

Now, my mentor and I stood on the rocky shore of the creek, watching a group of horseback riders waiting for their mounts to drink and splash. It was a magical moment teeming with characters and details.

I turned away from the charming story playing out in the creek, and something that looked like a heron standing on a jagged shore further down caught my eye. The rocks around him gleamed in the sunlight, and the water quietly eddied around the larger stones that fortified his peninsula. My mentor and I stared in its direction for a while, a different element, capturing each of us.

“I don’t think that’s a heron,“ she said.

I tried to zoom in with my camera, but it was no more accurate than my eyes. For a minute I thought of that scene in Harold and Maude, when Maude insisted that a remembered, flock of seagulls would always be glorious birds to her. I decided that even if that glimmer of light on the shore was a carefully hung T-shirt, or a spiky stump, I would let it remain a glorious bird that had first drawn my eye to a sliver of sunlight in the middle of the river and got ready to paint.

I knew what compelled me about that scene, and it wasn’t the possibility of a glorious bird. It was bright clarity of simplicity emerging from the murkiness of “everything all at once.”

The Not So Bad

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Scattered, 20″ x 20″, Oil on Canvas
Click Here if you would like this painting to live on your wall.

Most of the time I hate Ménière’s disease. When you’re not being violently rocked as you try to get to sleep at night, you are hugging the floor trying to get the world to stop looking like a ceiling fan that gets stuck on a quarter turn, and then resets itself before Turning again. There are perverse times, however, like right now, When the salts and crystals in my inner ear, create the sensation of being on a an inflatable raft on Lake Michigan on a gentle wave kind of day.

In two weeks. I’m going into the hospital to have a procedure that will probably cost a good amount of hearing in the affected ear in exchange for getting my life back. The trade is going to make it easier to drive and work with some stability. Even though I won’t miss the vertigo and the falls, I’m trying to commit tonight’s gentle wave sensation to memory. It’s a lesson that even the things that make life really hard sometimes, can bring an unexpected smile to your face.