“Resilience” is a trendy term that means the ability to recover, adapt and keep going when things don’t go as planned. Personally, I hate the whole idea. I’d expected to need it less in my dotage, but life… doesn’t go as planned.
I’m packing to go to the 21st Annual Sedona Plein Air Festival, which is one of the maddest, gladdest events in my calendar. My plan was to drive, but my husband was grounded by his doctor just two weeks ago. Now I plan to drive to Albany, leave him with our kids and fly from there. That meant either shipping out my frames and finished paintings or carefully curating them so they fit in a third piece of luggage. I decided on the latter. That in turn meant painting a smaller, replacement work. Luckily, I had a good idea and just enough time to execute it.
I’ve flipped my frames and paintings around six ways to Sunday and come up with a system by which I can carry seven frame/canvas combinations in addition to my two finished paintings. (Fair warning: I’m bringing almost no clothes; something had to give.) That is scant for a long event, but Carl Judson from Guerrilla Painters always shows up with frames and art supplies. I figured I’d carry a few spare boards and if I needed another frame, I’d buy one from him. Except that Carl had to cancel at the last minute.
One last potential wrinkle: air traffic controllers got their last (partial) paycheck yesterday. While they’re not calling out sick yet, I remember that it took a shortage of air traffic controllers snarling air travel in the New York area to resolve the 2018 government shutdown. I’ll try to remember to keep my sketchbook in my carryon. Just in case.
Curve balls also bounce
Life has a way of changing plans just when we think we’ve got everything sorted. One minute, we’re ready to paint, teach, or show; the next, our old beater of a car won’t start, the weather turns, or a kid calls with a crisis.
Plein air painters have lots of practice at this—we face curve balls every time we go outdoors. The light shifts, clouds whip up or vanish, the boat at the center of our composition goes out to sea. We can fold, or we can adapt. The best painters learn to pivot, to find something new in what’s been handed to them.
That’s really what resilience looks like. It’s not about pushing through as if nothing happened; it’s about letting the unexpected become part of the process. Rain, a broken easel or a changed plan might just lead to something more expressive, more alive.
The same applies outside the studio. Plans fall apart, opportunities shift, and we can either resist or reframe. The artist’s mindset—looking closely, staying flexible, and responding to what’s actually in front of us instead of what we’d conceptualized—is a surprisingly good way to handle life.
Curve balls remind us that creativity isn’t just what we do with paint, it’s how we navigate everything else, too. After all, the world doesn’t owe us stasis. Instead, it gives us movement, color, surprise and change. Learning to respond to that with a cheerful attitude is what keeps us moving.
