Category: artistic personality

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What are your goals for 2019?

If you’re talking about more paintings than you’re making, you may have a work-habit problem.

Christmas Eve, by Carol L. Douglas

I’ve been texting back and forth with a few friends about our plans for the coming year. These all involve metrics: how many shows, how many social media hits, sales volume, number of students, on-line vs. bricks-and-mortar sales. Artistic goals seem to play no part in this. Yet, without them, what’s the point of being a painter?

I’m not much of a New Year’s resolution-maker. I give myself one task on January 1, and that’s to remove myself from all the junk mail lists I’ve gotten on in the past year. That’s less a resolution than a reminder, like having your annual physical on your birthday.

Christmas night, by Carol L. Douglas

I address the things I want to fix in my life when they first appear as a problem, not on an arbitrary date in Christmastide when I’m already feeling sluggish from too much holiday. So yesterday when someone asked me about my artistic resolutions for the coming year, I was unable to answer.

But to say I don’t have artistic goals would be wrong. They include doing more abstraction, more small studies, and more forays into the world of magical realism. But don’t hold me to them. By midsummer, I may have abandoned these ideas completely and be fascinated by Kleig lights and cougars.

Schoolbus, by Carol L. Douglas

If that’s you, too, don’t despair. That’s the artistic temperament in a nutshell.  When it works successfully, an artistic temperament is a great intellectual curiosity coupled with very disciplined work habits. A lot of people have that backwards: they see undisciplined work habits as a sign of being ‘artistic’, and don’t seem to notice the paucity of ideas in the work being churned out. Or not being churned out. If you’re talking about more paintings than you’re making, you may have a work-habit problem.

I particularly respect my old friend Cindy Zaglin in this respect. She’s survived cancer and Hurricane Sandy. Her answer to every bump in the road is to trudge over to her Brooklyn studio to make more art. If she was worried about sales numbers, or critical reception, she could never have gone down the artistic path she has. (She was sort of a realist when I met her many years ago.) Whatever the question, the answer for her has always been to sort it out by making more art.

Nautilus was my last ‘serious’ painting of 2018, and even here I couldn’t get the magical realism out of my mind.

I took last week off to spend time with my family. You’d think that with all that spare time, our house would be immaculate, but it’s the other way around. Without routine, it rapidly disintegrated into a mess. I myself was restless and fractious. By yesterday I was anxiously drawing in my sketchbook, eager to get back into the studio. And so today, between visits to my dentist to get a tooth fixed (ah, Christmas!) and my physical therapist to work on my back, I’ll do just that. The metrics and plans will just have to wait.

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OC, forget about the D

Neat people get a bad rap in the arts. Still, I think it’s the best way to work.

Bathtime, by Carol L. Douglas
“What my mother would love the most for her birthday,” my daughter once announced, “is for me to go to her house and throw something away.” Immediately, my in-box lit up with suggestions for help with my hoarding problem.
That wasn’t what Mary was saying. In fact, I’m ruthless about order. Buying me something would be a waste of time and money.
I came home from Nova Scotia to ants. There were three different sizes, all darting around the kitchen. “There’s no food lying out,” protested my husband when I suggested that scrubbing might help.
Still life, by Carol L. Douglas
A concatenation of events led to the breakdown of our household standards. I was traveling. Our washing machine is broken, and the new one has been on back-order for weeks. Kids flitted home for the summer. The elderly dog’s incontinence is now the norm.
My husband is also what we currently call a ‘creative’ (he writes software). He purports to be unaffected by disorder. I’m skeptical. Popular wisdom tells us that creatives are messier than average. That doesn’t mean they ought to be.
I can paint without vacuuming the pillbugs in the basement, even though I know they’re there. But if there’s unopened mail or laundry that needs to be folded; I need to deal with it immediately, before I go in my studio.
Still life, by Carol L. Douglas
I haven’t always been this way. The public rooms in my childhood home were neat; the upstairs was a mess. My mother worked full time, had a big house, and raised a slew of kids. I did the same thing, with the same results.
My siblings and I were diagnosed as ‘hyperactive’. Teachers said my kids were ADHD. Too late, I realized that they should really be tagged “children of an over-committed mother.” I started being more tyrannical about cleaning.
Tracey Emin may not be my favorite artist, but she was right when she pointed out that “there are good artists that have children. Of course there are. They are called men.” The amount of work needed to raise children and pursue a career as an artist is overwhelming. It’s even more complicated when your work and living space are jumbled together.
Still life, by Carol L. Douglas
Our ancestors had to be neater than we are. They didn’t live in a throwaway culture. Tools were treasured, so they were oiled and put back as soon as they were used. Spending on food and clothing went from consuming half the family budget in 1900 to less than a fifth in 2000. When something took so much work and effort to acquire, one didn’t treat it lightly.
Today we all wallow in stuff. Many young people have told me they think they’re OCD. That’s just something they say when experiencing the strange compulsion to clean for the first time. “No,” I reply, “you’re anxious because neat is your normal state, but you haven’t embraced it yet. Go clean your room.” Many of those kids haven’t internalized that ‘perfect is the enemy of good,’ nor have they learned how to be organized.
The downside of having a studio in your house is that you can’t just go to the office to escape your home. I struggled through last week, tired and barely meeting my obligations. Finally, on Saturday, we gave the place a thorough cleaning. Suddenly, my energy and the urge to be creative are back again. Fancy that.