Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman

Yes, I’m old.  No, I have not enrolled in art school, not yet anyway.  But I have long had a fascination with art school.  However, my life path took me to writing poetry and becoming an English major. Later, I received a teaching degree in Creative Arts Education.  I dabbled with art and always felt I had to choose between writing poetry and making art.  So, I chose words instead of paint.  Words felt more portable, and I was always on the move in my younger days. And if I’m honest, I’m still always moving, still getting ready to get up and go at any minute.  Poetry fit my ADHD self.  Art took a different kind of concentration.  I thought you had to sit still to make art, and I’m not that good at sitting for very long. 

Recently, a good friend told me about Nell Painter’s book, Old in Art School.  I knew immediately that I had to push it up to first on my summer reading list.  I indulged in reading Nell’s journey from Princeton history academic to an BFA at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of Visual Arts to an MFA from the prestigious Rhode Island School of design.  Much of Nell’s book is familiar to me because she is a Jersey girl, and I also attended Rutgers as both an undergraduate and graduate.  The essential questions of what is art and who is an artist repeat as a refrain in this memoir.  I took a long, slow read, trying my best to experience what Nell had lived. Her process was very interesting to me. She didn’t approach art making in a conventional way, and her love of history ended up informing and enriching her art.

My interest in art has taken a circuitous route.  From the time I could grasp a pencil, I drew – mostly animals and characters from books.  Then I moved on to nature and cityscapes.  I knew I would never be “an Artist,” but I found comfort in making marks on paper.  Making art was important to me, not the lure of being an Artist.  Although, I did have a couple of forays into the Art World. The first was my master’s thesis where I opted to write both a scholarly paper and create sculptures.  No matter, that I had never created a sculpture in my life.  I dove deep into the project, creating twenty macrame sculptures depicting many stages of womanhood.  Now, it seems to me a little ridiculous, but back then I was dead serious about my art and spent hundreds of hours designing and fabricating these giant woven creations.  The second foray was in 1979 when I visited the Brooklyn Museum to see Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party.  I was awed by her designs and the skill in which she created a triangular table with thirteen place settings paying homage to various female historical figures.  At the exhibition, I saw a poster announcing a call for quilters and embroiders for Judy’s next project, The Birth Project.  Again, I was fearless and probably naive.  I never quilted before, but I was a very good embroiderer.  I’m not sure I really understood the level of skill one needs to be considered proficient.  I’m quite sure I didn’t but that helped me to plunge blithely along and work hard.  I was accepted as one of Judy’s quilters, and I created one image of her work, “The Crowning.”  I learned a lot from this experience and thought I could become an Artist without much formal training. I was quickly disavowed of this notion.  So back to school I went to become a teacher and use my love of art to engage my young students.

I chose to make teaching my Art, and I didn’t write poetry again until I was in my fifties. However,  my art and poetry were woven into my teaching, and I found pleasure in showing my students the joys of the spoken word and visual arts.  We wrote like e.e.cummings, painted like O’Keefe, and created class story quilts like Faith Ringgold.   But still I knew something inside me was missing, so enrolled in Saturday art courses at Parsons School of Design in New York City. This was in the early 1990’s. I took drawing and watercolor classes in my two years that I spent there.  I had to take Drawing I twice, on the suggestion of my teacher, which deflated me, but ultimately made me a much better at drawing.  It also made me aware of how much concentration and discipline you need to become an Artist.  Needless to say, I went back to the safety of the classroom and delved into post-graduate work in reading, writing, and literacy. (To read more about why I teach and all the gifts it has given me, read my latest article, “What I Know to be True: Indulgence.”)

As I am facing the last years of my teaching career, I realize that I need to cultivate that artist side of me again.  I have kept it alive in doing little nature sketches, playing with color, and taking lots of photographs.  But now, I am keenly aware that I must take up a new path, forge ahead in a new creative direction, and take on a beginner’s mind once again.  Honestly, the thought excites me.  I refuse to become old and set in my ways.  I refuse to go quietly.  I will continue to write poetry and prose, and I’m going to take up art as a kind of long, beautiful meditation.  I’m not sure what exactly I’ll create whether watercolor, charcoal, or collage.  Maybe a mixture.  Maybe use my photography as a base.  I’m not sure yet.  I’m still in the pondering stage.  But I do know that art is important to me, creating is what I was placed here to do.  I spent years sharing the Arts with children, and now I hope I have a couple of decades left to open myself to art and let in all the glorious color and light.  

Some of my Recent Ponderings