The Challenge To Create (2011)
Why have I never been bored? For more than fifty years I have never ceased to work.—Henri Matisse
[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Creativity does not always come easily and throughout one’s life there are moments when it seems one is faced with challenge after challenge; distracting matters that inhibit or sometimes prohibit being able to work. I have known more than one artist who had little choice but to completely give up their life’s work because of one challenge or another. Life is not easy for anyone, but there are times when I wonder if the life of an artists, which is so keenly dependent upon the use of nearly all our faculties, does not somehow invite disaster more than others.
For Matisse, his greatest challenges all seemed to arrive one upon another. First came his divorce from his wife of 41 years, Amélie, due in part to the artist’s continued relationship with Lydia Delectorskaya, a young Serbian refugee who had been Amélie’s companion, but more due to Matisse’s own stubbornness and insistence upon being alone. Personal relationships never were exactly his strong point.  Shortly thereafter, Matisse became ill with what was later discovered to be cancer. Surgery and severe treatments challenged not only his creativity, but his ability to work, to stand for long hours, to mix paints, and to hold a brush.
Then, in the midst of all the physical challenge, came World War II. Despite the encouragement of his children and American supporters, Matisse refused to leave France. He did move to a more secluded home on the outskirts of Vence, which at least removed him from the most severe activity. Matisse was intentionally unpolitical and deliberately worked to keep his paintings as removed from politics as well. Yet, he could not avoid the challenge of worrying about the fate of his paintings in occupied France and Russia. Another challenge came as his daughter, Marguerite, and younger son Jean were fiercely involved in the French resistance. Marguerite was captured and tortured by the Gestapo, but managed to escape from a cattle car on its way to an internment camp.[/one_half]
[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]All this trouble and worry created one challenge after another for the artist. He spent most of the period from 1941 to 1946 in near solitude, often unable to get out of bed, and carefully avoiding any social contacts that might be suspect. Yet, during this most difficult period was when he began work on his cutouts. It was while he was confined to Vence that he completed all the cutouts that would appear in his book, Jazz, in 1947. Where socializing with people held unknown dangers, he turned his attention to nature, his two cats, and caring for an unknown number of doves, all of which influenced his cutouts. Through every challenge that was thrown at him, Matisse never stopped working.
Life is nothing without challenge and one never knows in advance how a challenge might affect an artist’s work. Matisse met challenge with a renewed energy that carried him through his later stages of life. His work in the face of both physical and personal adversity becomes inspirational when one realizes all that the artist had to overcome in creating those latter day works. Illness itself is a significant challenge, even with modern treatments that alone might be enough to sideline someone. Combine that with the complete crumbling of life’s other structures and most of us might just stop.
When I first get up of the morning, while making that first cup of coffee, I look at the weather forecast to see what challenge I may face in the coming day. Dry days are good, wet or cold days not so much. Schedules create a challenge that can be quite distracting. Family needs sometimes conflict with my ability to sit down and edit. Some days, just finding a sense of creative motivation is a challenge. Yet, we must go on. Challenge itself fuels our creativity. This is the reality of art.[/one_half_last]
Shame, No Shame
All Wash(er)ed Up (2010)
In the face of patriarchy, it is a brave act indeed for both men and women to embrace, rather than shame or attempt to eradicate, the feminine.—Alanis Morissette
[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]I grew up being taught that everyone had a responsibility to work hard. Both my parents worked long hours. I had my first paycheck at 14. Sitting around idly isn’t something I do well. I fail to understand this act of binge-watching television series because after about an hour everything in my body tells me I need to be up being productive. We were taught that it didn’t matter what you did, that all jobs contributed to the greater good and deserved people’s respect. Looking down on, or shaming someone, just because of their occupation was about as rude and ignorant a thing one could do.
So, as I’ve grown up and gotten a taste for how the world actually is, I am continually disappointed when this particular sin of shaming other people shows up, typically denigrating a friend for something they’ve done to feed themselves and/or their family, complete with name-calling and harassment. As this has happened within my circle of friends three times in the past five days, I’m calling bullshit on the shame patrol. There is no shame in working hard, no shame in getting one’s hands (and body) dirty, no shame in sweating hard, and certainly no shame in doing jobs you don’t especially like just to keep the lights on and food on the table.
One of the earliest impacts on my sense of work ethic was a WWII veteran named Warren Hartsocks. A short, stocky man who never lost his buzz cut, Hartsocks had dropped out of school to join the military. The US Army taught him to be a mechanic and that’s what he proceeded to do the rest of his life. If you came across Hartsocks during the day, he was likely wearing a well-stained wife-beater t-shirt and baggy grey pants, equally stained. He was missing most his teeth, eternally had an unlit stogie in the corner of his mouth, had a vocabulary that would make a sailor blush, and in the summer his body odor could get pretty strong. People called him a dirty, foul-mouthed mechanic and tried to avoid him, but he worked hard for every dime he made, was a gentle soul, and took the time to teach me how to fish. [/one_half]
[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]The list of occupations society often shames is too long, but here’s a list of the ones that I see most often:
I can only think of one occupation that deserves shame: Politicians. Our country’s founders envisioned elected office to be one of public service, not privilege or power, and certainly not one that led to wealth. The concept was that a person would give a period of time to serve the people from their elected districts, not pander to ridiculous ideologues and corporations with deep pockets. Politicians inherently serve only their own interests at the expense of the rest of us. They have taken us from being a democracy to an oligarchy. Public office was never designed to be a position of profit, but one of giving to one’s country.
Too many days I go to bed totally disappointed in the human race. We shame those who work the hardest and praise those who contribute to our demise. Perhaps the real shame is on us all.[/one_half_last]
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