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Category: Carol L. Douglas

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Dance of Death

The Triumph of Death, c. 1562, Pieter Bruegel the Elder
I admit that I’m fascinated by pandemics, and am morbidly curious to see how the Ebola epidemic works its way through the First World.
Doktor Schnabel von Rom, engraving by Paul FĂźrst, 1656. Plague doctors were hired by towns to control epidemic. Some wore a beak-like mask which was filled with aromatic herbs designed to prevent the spread of disease through “miasma” or putrid air.
The mother of all pandemics was the Black Death, which peaked in Europe in 1346–53. It killed between 75 and 200 million people at a time when the world’s population was only 450 million people. (Amazingly, it wasn’t until a few years ago that the pathogen responsible for it—the Yersinia pestisbacterium—was definitively identified.)
The Triumph of Death, c. 1446, fresco, Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo
Originating in the plains of central Asia—the ‘Stans’—it traveled down the Silk Road to the Crimea. From there, it was carried into Europe by fleas on the rats on merchant ships. It is estimated to have killed 30-60% of Europe’s population.
Knight, Death and the Devil, 1513, engraving by Albrecht DĂźrer
The plague returned repeatedly in Europe through the 14thto 17th centuries. It came to the United States as part of a 19thcentury pandemic that started in China. It is still active today, although treatable with antibiotics; each year a dozen or so Americans are diagnosed with it. Rather more worrisome, a drug-resistant form of the disease was found in Africa in the 1990s.
Murder of Archbishop Ambrosius in the Moscow Plague Riot of 1771, engraving by Charles Michel Geoffroy, 1845. The Archbishop had attempted to prevent citizens from gathering at the Icon of the Virgin Mary of Bogolyubovo in Kitaigorod as a quarantine measure.
The plague caused great social upheaval in Europe. Those with means left their urban homes and shut themselves off from the world—the first recorded ‘survivalists’. The dead received perfunctory attention, since their corpses were dangerous. Faith was bifurcated: some abandoned it in an ‘eat, drink and be merry’ hedonism, while others became more frenzied.  Local and global trade was frozen, resulting in shortages and spiraling inflation. On the other hand, the sudden, extreme shortage of laborers led to the end of the manorial system of serfdom and the beginning of a wage-based economy in Europe.
Danse Macabre, Bernt Notke, end of the 15th century, St. Nicholas’ Church, Tallinn, Estonia. The Danse Macabre is a medieval art genre which tells us that—no matter our station in life—Death unites us all. 
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Second Sleep

Squash stored in the off-the-grid compound. Wish I would be here in the winter.

My current travels have made me think about segmented sleep—the idea that we sleep in two separate chunks during the night. Over a twelve-hour time frame, people historically slept for 3-4 hours, were awake for three or four hours, and then slept again for three or four hours. This is not a new idea, and a lot of research supports it.

Sea captain carved by a Maine ship’s carpenter some time in the last century. A few pieces by him in the off-the-grid compound.
Like all kids do, my new grandson Jake came out of the womb as a nocturnal creature. Listening to him fuss during the night, I was reminded that the first, most pressing job of new parents is to train their children to sleep at night. I remember this as the hardest job of parenting, and my own children effectively wrecked my ability to sleep through the night. I’m still a cyclical insomniac.
I’m in Maine looking for locations for my 2015 workshops. Here’s surf at Popham Beach.
We’ve spent the last two nights off the grid, where the only light from 6:14 PM to 6:38 AM comes from the moon and stars or candles and flashlights. Since a lot of hay has been made about how electric light, TV, radio, and the internet confuses modern man’s sleep cycle, being off line should help, right? Honestly, I don’t think it has, but perhaps a few nights here and there can’t erase a half-century of bad habits.
Granite blocks at Ft. Popham State Historic Site, a Civil-War era fort.

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What I do in my down time

The whole Northeast is beautiful this week, but my camera is broken, so cell phone pictures are what you’re getting.

Having been in the Berkshires this week, I thought I’d run up to Maine and look at a few possible properties to host my 2015 workshops. Again, I’m staying in the cabin off the grid, but this time I have my husband with me.

Off the grid is so much nicer when you have your Significant Other with you.
And he loves the place. “I figured that outhouse was half a mile away, through the woods,” he teased. And then, “I’d like to come back here in the winter.”
It’s easier with company; the coyotes don’t seem so close, and reports of a mountain lion aren’t quite as terrifying when you’re walking on wooded path on a moonless night.
So many places one could host a workshop… this is just one of my dream homes that isn’t on the market.
That was last night. This morning dawned clear and cold and he got a tiny taste of what winter in the woods might be like. And he’s still enthusiastic. Go figure.
The Maine landscape is so varied that I could move my workshop up and down the coast for years and it would never get stale.
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Bicycle artist

Rat, Michael Wallace, 2013. The pictures are by necessity crude, and the charming wobble comes from the accuracy of GPS, which records changes of a few feet.
Michael Wallace draws pictures using his bicycle, his Samsung Galaxy smartphone, two GPS apps, and the streets of Southeast Baltimore. It’s a simple concept: his phone records his rides (the double apps are in case of crashes). In five years, he has completed nearly 500 drawing-rides.
Wallace prints out Google maps and sketches his route over them. Then he consults Google Maps Satellite View to verify that the route he’s planned actually exists. In an online interview, Wallace said he doesn’t climb or jump fences. When obstacles require changes on the fly, Wallace consults the printed map he’s carrying.
Downtown Crab, Michael Wallace, 2013.
Wallace isn’t blindly following his GPS; the act of mapping out the pictures makes him memorize the route. This is analogous to what happens when an artist draws a subject before painting; he can draw it again, much faster and more expressively, because he has memorized the subject. In some way, Wallace is duplicating this drawing process, but while using his whole body.
Sailboat, Michael Wallace, 2013.
I have the same phone and a bicycle. I’m going to try this when I get back to the Duchy.

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Smart kids

 
“The smartest kid in class, by contrast, is not an expensive problem. A boy or girl who finishes an assignment early can be handed a book and told to read quietly while the teacher works on getting other children caught up. What would clearly be neglect if it happened to a special-needs child tends to look different if the child is gifted: Being left alone might even feel like a reward, an acknowledgment of being a fast learner.”
When I came across that in a recent Boston Globe pieceon educating gifted kids, I had to laugh. Having once been the smartest kid in my public school class, I was anything but a cheap problem to fix; in fact, my parents ended up sending me to a private school to finish high school. I’m a great example of high intellect swamped by low expectations.
Fast-forward a generation to my own kids’ educations. You would think it would be better, but it’s not. Gifted and talented programs—all the rage before No Child Left Behind—have (if they still exist at all) become shock troops in the military boarding school approach to education we’ve adopted. More seat work, more homework, no time for things like art and music.
Busy work is the bane of the bright child’s existence. It teaches him to blow off his homework and rely on test-taking skills to get by. Moreover, it ignores developing the synthetic, intuitive parts of his brain, which are developedby studying art and music, and, yes, by daydreaming.
I have a friend who’s a classicist, living in penury as an adjunct professor. I’ve often thought that our school district should send three kids to her and pay her the roughly $65,000 it gets for educating them for a year. After four years, they would know history, music, the arts, Greek and Latin.
And before you tell me that’s not enough, America was built by people with exactly that education.

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Will your neighborhood art historian be replaced by a robot?

The most expensive painting on record is currently Paul Cezanne’s The Card Players, which sold for an estimated $259 million in 2011. (The exact price is unknown.)
In a paper entitled Toward Automated Discovery Of Artistic Influence, Babak Saleh and his Rutgers team claim to have used imaging software and ‘classification systems’ to automate the process of identifying artistic influences.
Last week, Apollo Magazine askedwhether robots can indeed replace art historians. They reached the same conclusions as did I—nope—but for different reasons.
The second most expensive painting on record is currently Jackson Pollock’s No. 5, 1948, which sold for $140 million in 2006.
The international art market moved $66 billion last year, so the experts in authenticating and analyzing paintings are valuable. And when they work at museums and galleries, art history majors are not badly paid. In 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, museum curators and archivists made slightly more than $45,000 a year.
But the rub is when art historians enter the academic stream. While post-secondary teaching jobs are expected to growin the next decade, even the BLS admits that many of these jobs will be for adjuncts, or part-timers. In fact, more than ¾ of college professors are adjuncts, and their wages are abysmal: between $1000 and $5000 per course. As Salon pointed out this month, that leads to professors with PhDs earning the same amount as the average full-time barista—who’s not expected to do curriculum development or grade papers on his own time.
The third most expensive painting on record is currently Willem de Kooning’s Woman III, which sold for $137.5 million in 2006.
Why does the United States tolerate a system where university educations are obscenely expensive at the same time as they’re being provided by slave labor? Beats me. But there is no reason to automate intellectual disciplines when we pay them atrociously. Your art history degree is safe for now.


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Creativity

Maternity, Mary Cassatt, 1890. Cassatt never married nor had children. It would have been impossible in her era to mix her career and a family.
Sorry about the delayed post. I was busy caring for a baby.
Actually, I’m not all that sorry. After all, all other creativity derives from this fundamental beginning of life. The word “create” derives from the Latin creare: â€˜to make, bring forth, produce, beget,’ and is related to crescere: â€˜arise, grow.’ My etymology dictionary also links the latter to the Greek kouros (boy), and kore (girl), but I’ll take that with a grain of salt.
Most of the artists I know are childless, and the ones who do have children struggle to resolve the demands of their careers with the demands of parenting. Not that this isn’t true of all careers, but there’s something about the creative impulse that seems to channel in one direction or another. I’m an outlier because not only do I have kids, I have a lot of them.
Breakfast in Bed, Mary Cassatt, 1897. 
My daughter had a difficult delivery and I’m back in Pittsfield helping her until I’m sure she’s recovered.
We Americans have a weird attitude toward parenting. In trying to give women equal access to the marketplace, we’ve relegated parenting to the status of a hobby or a part-time job. Done right, it’s difficult work, demanding high levels of organization, energy, intelligence and time. My daughter is a well-paid professional, and I don’t want to see her dump her career to stay home. But having worked through my own parenting years, I also don’t want to see her wandering around in a fog of exhaustion, either.
But enough of this. Junior needs changing and his mom needs her meds before we start the round of doctor’s office, visiting nurse, visiting specialist. This baby stuff is a lot of work.
Baby Reaching For An Apple, Mary Cassatt, 1893
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New drug boosts creativity, cures hypertension, depression, and diabetes… and it’s free!

A young walker in the Duchy.
A Stanford studyearlier this year found that walking boosts creativity. This is a real-time effect, and it lasts during the time you’re walking and for a short while thereafter. It gives legs to the idea that we get our best ideas while walking.
This will come as no surprise to people who walk regularly. I have no idea how it motivates the circuitry of one’s brain (any more than I understand how it massages the gut or how it strengthens back muscles) but as a lifelong walker, I’m convinced it works. It certainly reduces anxiety. I’m finding myself walking upwards of six miles a day this month, and it’s done much to assuage my grief and worry over the upheavals in my personal life.
Walking every day has the perverse effect of making me like winter more, although I’m not always keen on the way sidewalks are maintained here in Rochester.
Although I’ve been a dedicated walker/runner/hiker my whole adult life, about five years ago my doctor started making noises at me about cholesterol and high blood pressure. I realized that I needed to ramp up the pace. Now it’s the first thing I do every day, and I’m willing to spend at least two hours a day exercising.
The biggest objection people make to walking is, “I don’t have the time.” On the other hand, the average American watches five hours of television a day.
I’m self-employed, so I can set my own schedule. I walk my husband to work every morning. Most married couples have very little time to talk to each other; we are guaranteed the better part of an hour together. (Since the average car in the US costs more than $9000 a year to own and operate, we save a lot of money, too.)
Later in the morning, I walk with a small posse. Who shows up varies by the day, but we’re all self-employed or telecommuters.
Walking is gentle on the environment. This is the annual salt collection at the side of our street after the snow melts. It’s a miracle anything grows here.
It’s paid off: I’m apparently the only middle-aged American who isn’t takingsome kind of prescription drug. Nearly 70 percent of Americans of all ages are on at least one medication, and more than half take two or more. Among women in my age cohort, a stunning one in four are taking antidepressants.
Walking is cheap. It makes you creative, it makes you happy, it gives you great gams, and it mitigates many diseases of aging like diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol. Why doesn’t everyone do it?

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Philistines, everywhere

Graffiti on the Colby Street pedestrian bridge in Rochester. I trudge over it daily, so I can certainly relate to these two flipper men doing endless laps on the bridge.
Being a believer in private property rights, I’m generally not amused by graffiti, but last Friday when I came across two swimmers on the Colby Street pedestrian bridge, I genuinely LOLed. The pedestrian bridge does kind of look like a 50-meter lap lane, and because it’s a regular part of my route, I often feel like I’m swimming mindlessly back and forth across it.
Meh. Not as witty as the first graffiti-artist, but at least he was trying.
Periodically, people commit acts of art on the pedestrian bridge (usually involving arrangements of found objects). They seldom last more than 24 hours before some Philistine knocks them apart. So I wasn’t surprised to walk by on Monday and see the poor swimmers defaced with a second layer of graffiti. It wasn’t nearly as witty, but at least the poor anonymous second writer tried.
But then comes the inevitable and predictable impulse to destruction. Really makes you despair for the human race.
Tuesday, the whole thing was scrubbed out by a third graffiti artist, whose only goal was to deface the message that preceded him.

It’s a great metaphor for the forces of creation and destruction that coexist in the human heart. In my current bleak mood, it makes me wonder why artists even try.
My young friend Serina Mo reminded me of this recently by mentioning the aged enfants terrible of the British art scene, Jake and Dinos Chapman. In their massive work of destruction, Insult to Injury, they defaced a rare folio of Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War.
From Insult to Injury, 2003, by Jake and Dinos Chapman. The Chapman brothers added nothing to Goya’s work. I hope they fade into obscurity, taking their micron pens with them.
In the short run, it made them famous. It tore at notions of preciousness and art. In the long run, it made the tremendous presumption that modern sensibilities and intellectualism are superior to the pain and suffering drawn by Goya. If nothing else, the world should know by now that rich, silly ninnies are transient, but war and death are eternal verities.

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Everything I know about cleaning

Hercules rerouting the rivers Alpheus and Peneus to clean the Augean stables, Roman mosaic, 3rd century AD. The Fifth Labor of Hercules was intended to be humiliating and impossible, since the livestock were divine and produced enormous quantities of manure. No metaphor there.
I am trying to put my house and studio in order after months on the road.
There are those who might think this should be blank, because I don’t know anything about cleaning, but they would in fact be wrong. Most orderly people don’t need to think about how they keep things up; I have to think about it a great deal.
  1. Be driven by process, not results: King Augeas’ stables are very dirty and if you’re not Hercules, the only way to get them clean is to plug along despite how little progress it appears you are making. Yesterday I managed to get half a room finished; I was stalled by the piles of receipts and bills that needed attention on the dining room table. I can either be driven nuts by this, or I can just plug along until I finish.
  2. Actually put stuff away. That really slows you down—especially if you think the stuff has no place—but in the end it’s far more effective than moving piles of stuff from point to point.
  3. Or get rid of stuff. We 21st century Americans are drowning in material goods. To me there’s energy and potential in open space.
  4. Clean the perimeter first, starting at one point and working your way around the room. I read this in a book about professional cleaning, and it really works. I think it’s a continuation of point #1: if you’re looking at the walls, you can’t be driven nuts by your current lack of results.
  5. Don’t clean what isn’t dirty. Don’t straighten what isn’t messed up.
  6. Do all cleaning in a single pass. I am lucky enough to have modern windows, and I clean them whenever I clean my rooms. It’s dumb to pull the furniture out to vacuum and then not do the crown-molding, the windows, and the chair rails.
  7. Once you get one corner of your space clean, protect it; it’s a place to retreat when you lose your mind. Normally, this is the second floor of my house, which I generally keep pretty tidy. However, my peripatetic paintings from the RIT show seem to be wandering around up there looking for a home. So for now, I’m taking solace in the fact that my freezer—which was full of ice because someone had neglected to pull the door totally closed—is now immaculate. Even that small rectangle of order is enough to prevent me from losing my mind.

Hercules takes a break, Attic black figure skyphos, c. 500 B.C. The goddess Athena is pouring him a cup of wine. (Mount Holyoke College Art Museum)


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