Art vs. Life

When Life Seems Dark, For Whatever Reason, Artists have a little Secret

You have to be completely unaware or in a state of denial to not feel the collective anxiety of the times we are  going through, but I have an idea of something that might help.  Actually I use to hate to have someone cheerful or philosophical when I was sad or hurting, but there are so many things we can do to make this a better time for all of us.

When I was growing up, and it was a post Depression time, born in 1946, we heard a lot about the Depression and
what it meant to people.     The thought of children starving anywhere is the most awful thought I can think of. My uncle, Maurice Pate, of Osterville, was the founder of UNICEF, because he thought to be compliant in the starvation of children anywhere was morally unacceptable.   We are all going to be faced with new realities. There are a few small saving graces , the things we glean from hard times.  One of those for me is how I learned to make art out of almost nothing at all.

Artists come from a mindset that we create things,  things that interest us and things that make us laugh, things that make us cry, but always the urge is to give birth to something new.     If you can take that metaphor, imagine the dark time of pregnancy when a baby is closed in a dark womb growing.   That is where all the miracles take place.   When faced with what looks like a dark long time, remember that is a time for the incubation of creativity.

Eventually life looks toward the light and after a long silent dead winter, Spring Blooms.     That is why we must embrace whatever this time looks like in the coming weeks.    It may be a time of contraction for so many .

Money will not be availiable as it once was, but life will go on anyway.    What could that change look like in a daily life?   I have thought often these past few days of how meager our life in the fifties might look to a modern young
couple.   When my husband and I were married we lived in married student housing of sorts at the University of
Colorado.    It consisted of a renovated chicken coop, made of stone like some ancient building in Tuscany .
It was so small it had a wood stove and tin shower, no room for furniture in the bedroom, just a mattress on the floor and a kitchenet that was so low my husband could not stand up fully in it.   We took fifty dollars and bought
burlap and paint and made it into almost a doll house.     So romantic and rugged.   I remember the first frost of winter and how cold the cement bathroom floor seemed, and crawling into the cold tin shower was a shock.

Now we have an outdoor shower here on the Cape and can hardly wait to use it in the spring, and hate  closing it
down in the winter.   It is so much perspective really.

We made $350 a month with no credit, one yellow volkswagen bug and food we bought on discount at the salvage yard.   I guess it was hard times, but I don't remember it that way.   What we had was a lot more free time, close
friends and neighbors who came over and sat at our camp table with candles and played charades under the night
sky.   We were full of awe and wonder, not awe and shock.  

As children in a large Denver family, while blue laws existed, we had Sunday with our families, something only told
of in stories now.  We spent no money on Sunday because the stores were all closed.   We never drove around using gas.   We ate with our families and made toys of sticks and rocks from the yard.   My mother would take salt and
flour and water and make wonderful playdough from scratch for a  few pennies and we made sculpture for hours.

Some days she would mix up paint(poster paint) from dry pigment and we would carve potatoe prints and
print all the beautiful primary colors together on old newspaper,  the text would come through and I remember
the joy of the overlapping secondary colors and they evolved,  yellow and blue, then green, yellow and red then
orange.  It was pure magic, better than any color theory class I ever took.   Sometimes we would retrieve charcol
scraps from evening fires and draw with them.     On special Sundays we would make paper mache with wallpaper
paste and make sculptures using cardboard boxes and wire hangers as armatures.  

One of my favorite contemporary artists is Clyde Connell, from Louisiana, who after losing all of her material
wealth in the depression was force to move to Lake Bistenou, while her husband went from being a wealthy
Plantation owner to being a prison warden.    That was where she made her now world famous  Bound People
Sculpture from lumber scraps and brown paper bags and Elmers Glue,  Google her,  Clyde Connel and see these
timeless beautiful works that came from this desperate time in her life.

We will all be fine, we will roll up our sleeves and help those who need our help.  All that are able will help those
who are not. and be better for it, and make a new community.

In the meantime, buy a cheap set of number two pencils and good eraser and a  five dollar pack of  computer
copy paper and begin to sketch, take these supplies with you whereever you go , just incase you get bored
or have no access to TV or other modern time stealers,  and begin a journal of the ways life can be rich. and your
newly aware view of the world around you.    

Its not going to be easy without money for everything we seemed to think we need, but it may be a richer time for
our hearts and souls.   When in doubt or despair, or boredom or any strange emotional state, Make Art

That is the Artists Way and it can be quite an adventure.