creativity Archives | Page 2 of 2

February 27, 2018

Maker culture

Knowing how to make things was part of our human birthright. Who stole it?

Little Giant, by Carol L. Douglas. Courtesy Camden Falls Gallery.

I have a to-do list a mile long. One item on it is a muslin mockup of a dress for my granddaughter Grace, who will be the flower girl in her aunt’s wedding in May. I’ll see Grace in Buffalo as I finish my Alabama trip, and I need this mockup to check her measurements. Grace is two years old and growing like a weed. I’ll make the bodice and skirt separately and stitch them together at the last minute, between my workshop in Rye and the wedding.

On Sunday I complained that I’d have to give up my Sunday nap to finish it. “Is there anything you can’t do?” a friend laughed. In truth, I’m only good at things that require spatial skills. That includes math, art and sewing. I can’t cook, although I don’t mind cleaning up afterward.

I learned to sew in 4H. That’s a venerable old organization dedicated to developing citizenship, leadership, and responsibility by teaching life skills. It’s also where I learned basic carpentry, animal husbandry, and how to make a pie crust. The first speech I ever gave was at the County Fair. It was on leavening agents and was called Lovely or Lumpy.

Catskill Farm, pastel, by Carol L. Douglas

Other things I learned at home: how to paint (from my father), how to garden, how to can vegetables, and how to put up hay. My parents were not farmers: my father was a psychologist and my mother a nurse. They were practitioners of the back-to-the-land movement, but everyone of their generation knew how to make and mend things. Today, if we do those things at all, we do them as hobbies or artisanal work.

When my twins were infants, I made them sleepers. It cost me more than they cost ready-made at Kmart. After that, I only sewed for special occasions.

That’s true across most of our economy. It’s cheaper to buy a new toaster than fix the one you have. It’s cheaper to buy baked beans than make them yourself. It’s certainly cheaper to buy a chair than build one. The consequence of this is that our kids have grown up in a world of consumption rather than creation. They have no idea that for humans, creativity is a natural part of life.

Still life, by Carol L. Douglas

Last week, someone sent me this irritating little piece in Smithsonian, which suggests we “leave the cairn-building to the experts.” Ours is certainly a scolding culture, and the goal of all that hectoring is to keep us as passive recipients of others’ experiences.

Why the passion for stacking up rocks on the beach anyway? The human animal is designed for creativity. Our throwaway culture has stolen that from us.

In Maine, there’s still much more of a make-or-mend culture than in other parts of the country. People really do patch up their cars and boots for another go-round. It’s also a more entrepreneurial society than our cosmopolitan centers. I don’t mean that in the Bill Gates sense. Kids who grow up with skilled laborers as parents understand that they don’t need a college degree to be useful, productive, self-supporting members of the community. Kids who grow up with self-employed parents understand there are more ways than a 9-to-5 job to earn a living.

It would be nice if we could add that to our measure of performance when we tote up how well a community does at preparing its kids for the future.

February 21, 2018

Action vs. Reaction: the boring times in the studio

Sometimes the balance between creativity and routine gets out of kilter, and it never seems to be in favor of creative time.

Places I’d rather be right now: Headwaters of the Hudson, by Carol L. Douglas, which anyone who’s been to Lake Tear of the Clouds would recognize as a romantic personification rather than the real thing.

I’m sorry there was no post yesterday. Grandchildren are human petri dishes, and mine gave me their norovirus. (That’s the nature of children, and I would change nothing.) I’m feeling better today, but not 100%.

Ironically, I’d planned to write about action vs. reaction. Every job has moments of each designed into it. For example, the EMT who saves your life is mostly reactive, responding to what’s happening to you and the instructions he’s getting over his radio. The engineer designing a new system of 0s and 1s is mostly active. As he interacts with his team, though, he is reactive.

But that’s in the particular. Generally speaking, most successful people are reactive much of the time. They’re listening to their competitors, their peers, and their customers, and trying to give the people what they want.

Palm and Sand, by Carol L. Douglas

The self-employed artist is stubbornly individualistic, but that doesn’t save him from reactivity. We treasure our active tasks, like painting or marketing, that we initiate and drive ourselves. Then there are tasks that are in response to others’ initiatives. For example, at 2 PM today, I must send an email. I don’t know why this particular moment is important to the organization but I do know that a small part of my mental energy today will be spent wondering whether gmail’s delayed-send feature really works.

Painting commissions, while on the ‘creative’ side of our ledger, are fundamentally reactive tasks. This is why some artists don’t enjoy them as much as other work. The impetus, the spark of idea, didn’t originate with us.

All sole proprietors exist in this maelstrom of action and reaction, which tug and vie for our scarce time.

Spring, by Carol L. Douglas, painted down the road a piece, on an April day.

Chief among the reactive tasks is bookkeeping, which I’d never do at all if the IRS didn’t prod me into it. Before I can file my taxes, I must audit my records to determine if they’re true. The whole job takes me the better part of a week. I think I should try doing the audits monthly. However, every February, I am so happy to be free of bookkeeping that I just go back to the Excel equivalent of stuffing receipts in an envelope.*

This year I decided to try to paint in the mornings and work on bookkeeping in the afternoons. This was a total failure. I would just settle in to my canvas and it would be time to move over to the dining room and its carefully separated piles of papers.

I’m back to my usual technique, which is to schedule tax prep during the nicest week of winter weather. It’s a knack, I tell you.

Why can’t I just ignore my taxes for a week and get back to them when the weather gets bad? Despite my protestations that I wouldn’t do this to myself again, I’ve arranged to be shot out of a cannon again this spring. On March 4, I’m leaving for a short painting trip through Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. My third daughter is getting married in May. And after that is my regularly scheduled season. It’s now or never, and the IRS doesn’t like never.

Fall cookies for another daughter’s wedding. That won’t work for May!

I have learned that tasks tend to be amorphous until they’re pinned down. That means that small ones, like “order paint” loom as large as “bake 1000 cookies for the wedding reception,” a job I will be doing without my designer pal Jane this year. Writing them down and classifying them helps me keep them in perspective.

I’ve written before about Bobbi Heath’s time management system, here. It’s a simple system that can stop you from losing your mind when you’re overwhelmed. Whatever system works for you, now is a great time to deploy it, before the weather gets fine and you’re on the run.

*I had a GPS that kept mileage records. I just retired it and bought MileIQ. It’s fantastic for the plein airpainter, who starts and stops and is pulled along by the wind.

January 26, 2018

The brain that changes itself

Inborn talent? That’s just another take on that old lie, determinism.

Violinist. Painted so long ago I remember nothing about it.

If you’ve taken one of my classes or workshops, you know that I’m not a big believer in inborn talent. We are all born with great potential in many different areas. In some instances, that potential is magnified and a prodigy appears. In too many other cases, that potential withers from lack of nurture.

I don’t believe we’re born to be artists or mathematicians, any more than I believe we’re born to be depressives or alcoholics. That’s just a variation on that hoary old lie, Determinism. It’s not nice whether it shows up as eugenics, racism, gender roles or Predestination.

Of course, there are instances where the brain is damaged, either before birth or by accident or illness. But even this doesn’t necessarily mean the end of creativity. I know a guitarist who suffered a traumatic brain injury. He works hard to learn his parts, but he plays them with beautiful understated good taste, sensitivity and skill.

Creation, by Carol L. Douglas

One of my favorite books is Dr. Norman Doidge’s The Brain that Changes Itself. Doidge is a Columbia-trained psychiatrist and on the faculty at University of Toronto, so he’s not talking through his hat when he claims that the human brain is “a plastic, living organ that can actually change its own structure and function, even into old age.”

One of the ways the human brain adapts to injury or aging is by encouraging healthy brain regions to compensate for damaged areas. For example, music confers benefits to dementia patients. Conversely, damage in one neural pathway may hurt others. There is a linkbetween deafness and dementia.

In some circumstances, healthy human brains cross-talk as a matter of course. This is a phenomenon called synesthesia, which is when stimulating one brain pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.

In the most common form, letters are mentally associated with colors, but colors can be associated with sounds, or mathematical sequences can be seen spatially. More rarely, there is overlap between sensory stimulus and emotional states.

We know very little about what causes this. Heck, we didn’t even admit it was real until a few years ago. However, a 2014 paper suggests a linkbetween synesthetia and higher levels of creativity.

Dancer, by Carol L. Douglas

Both synthesia and creativity work by creating or discovering links between different spheres, noted the authors, Lawrence E Marksand Catherine M. Mulvennad. These take the form of sensory links in synesthesia and conceptual links in metaphor. The sensory links are typically fixed and rigid. The conceptual links are mutable, however.

People with synesthesia show a greater capacity for creative cognition. This may be because of a link between synesthesia and neural hyperconnectivity, which plays a role in creativity.

Which came first, the synesthesia or the creativity? If Dr. Doidge is right, we all have the potential for running more than one process on the same neural tracks. I’m synesthetic myself, and I think they both grew up together in my brain.

July 28, 2016

The Practice of Solitude

“Headwaters of the Hudson,” oil on canvas, Carol L. Douglas.

If, like Garbo, you vant to be alone, the Maine coast in summer is not your place. During its 100-day season, a more gregarious habitation never existed.

Right now it’s trendy to declare, “I’m an introvert,” as if there were any need to justify the need for alone time. Society has always been wary of loners, but being alone is a requirement for serious work. If there’s anything at all to the idea of “talent,” it’s the capacity to separate oneself from the herd long enough to think.

This is not unique to the arts. I have known Dr. Kate Rittenhouse-Olson for four decades. There were many times when she turned down invitations to youthful hijinks because she needed to work. That capacity is why she’s an internationally-recognized cancer researcher today.

“The Long Way Home,” oil on canvas, Carol L. Douglas.

Each of us is a constantly-shifting mosaic of outer- and inner-driven motivations. This is a conundrum for creative people. Our work requires us to be alone, but what we produce is a form of communication.

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in his Nobel acceptance speech. “Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”

Plein air painting is, in some ways, performance art. We work outside in public spaces. That allows people to engage with our art. At the same time, we must keep our inward focus. It’s a delicate balance and at times it’s stressful.

The importance of being informed was impressed on my generation at home and at school. A daily paper was as much a part of a good upbringing as brushing one’s teeth in the morning. My Millennial children, on the other hand, don’t feel nearly as obligated to be politically and socially involved as we were. None of them take a daily paper or watch broadcast news. I’m starting to think they are smarter than me.

“Hudson Overlook,” Carol L. Douglas

While I’m painting in an event, I let my correspondence go. I ignore the news and Facebook. When I get back, my strongest impression is always that I haven’t missed a darn thing. Yes, there was horrible violence while I was gone. Sadly, that is no longer news. Yes, the major candidates went tit-for-tat about who could be the ugliest human being. Sadly, that tells me nothing I didn’t already know.

“Your kid does not attend in class.” Lots of parents hear that. So what? Daydreaming is just a nasty term for solitary thinking. It’s a rare human activity, and no creativity is possible without it. In a world where the bonds of interaction grow so tight that we can’t even sleep without our phones on our pillows, the art of being alone is even more precious. Grab it if you can. That is the direction in which genius lies.

May 26, 2015

The genius of routine

The Red Truck, oil on canvasboard, Carol L. Douglas

I believe that creativity rests less on freedom than on structure. I’m not the only person who’s discovered that genius requires discipline: from this Navy SEAL asserting that everything starts with making your bed to Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, the idea permeates current thought on the creative process.

Portrait of the Artist’s Studio. If you’re looking for the exotic air of the sereglio in my studio, you have come to the wrong place.

Writers and artists are frequently asked how we make meaningful work while earning a living. Currey set out to amass as much information as he could find about the routines underlying successful careers in the arts. Several of his common themes resonate with me.

A workspace with minimal distractions. People often want to stop and see my studio, and they’re always disappointed. It is not an ‘arty’ place. It’s a practical workspace, not much different in form from my wood shop. My most successful artist friends concentrate on having their stuff where they need it, even when the space is tiny and appears to be overflowing.

For me, the most difficult part of working out of my house is that I’m easily found.

I walk every day, unless the temperature drops below zero and the wind is blowing, or the snow is too deep.

A daily walk. I actually take two walks every day—the first one first thing in the morning, the second in late morning or at lunch time. This is a lifelong habit. Walking is my time to think, reflect, and pray. I rapidly sink into ennui when deprived of it.

As time-consuming as it is to walk several miles a day, my productivity actually drops if circumstances keep me from exercising.

Accountability. Unlike a writer, the visual artist can’t count brushstrokes or square inches of work. But we can assure that we work regular hours. I have noticed that this helps me get in the groove of painting faster. I’m convinced that the brain recognizes routine and appreciates it.

This is jeweler Jennifer Jones doing some of the busywork in her job—sorting findings by color.

A clear dividing line separating our important work and busywork. Most artists spend half their work day doing things like marketing, accounting, taxes, inventory control, etc. Unfortunately, we use our computers for that, which sucks us inevitably into the world of email and Facebook. Our ancestors may have spent a ton of time doing busywork, but at least it didn’t ding at them morning, noon and night.

I’ve noticed that I’m doing less sketching since I’ve gotten a smart phone. It’s too easy to pull it out to check messages and then get drawn into it.

A supportive partner. My husband and I have been happily married for almost 35 years. About two years ago, we had a heart-to-heart talk about my career and where it was going. It was obvious that getting out of Rochester was the next logical career step for me. He never hesitated. “Go,” he said, and I am. That’s amazing loyalty and support.

It used to be that painting en plein air saved you from distraction. Sadly, we now carry our distraction around with us.

Limited social lives.You know that arty guy you see at every opening? I wonder when he has time to get any work done.

Most successful artists I know are to some degree antisocial, and yet our work is essentially communication. People don’t just feel that they know us, they do know us, and we have to honor that. But like anyone else working for a living, we need time to actually get stuff done. I love teaching art and talking about art, but during the day I want to be busy making art.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in August 2015. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.

March 6, 2015

Objects of Grace

The Heavens Declare, 48X36, oil on linen, 2014

This month I have three pieces in Objects of Grace at Roberts Wesleyan’s Davison Gallery. This show was designed to accompany the school’s Schoenhals Symposium, which this year features art historian and writer Dr. James Romaine.

Dr. Romaine is a New York-based art historian. He is the president and co-founder of the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art and Associate Professor of Art at Nyack College.

Beauty Instead of Ashes, 48X36, oil on linen, 2014

Three Dimensions of Christian Creativity is scheduled for Thursday, March 19 at 4 PM at the Smith Science Center Auditorium. Romaine will discuss The Art of Tim Rollins + K.O.S. on Friday, March 20 at 4 PM in the same venue, and will lead a discussion at the Davison Gallery on Friday, March 20, from noon to one.

That’s where I come in. Included in the exhibit are four artists (Sandra Bowden, Makoto Fujimura, Edward Knippers, and Joel Shessley) featured in Dr. Romaine’s book, Objects of Grace: Conversations on Creativity and Faith. Also in the exhibit are three “significant local artists treating Christian themes, Scot Bennett, Carol Douglas and Luvon Sheppard,” and pieces from Robert Wesleyan’s permanent collection.

The Harvest is Plenty, 48X36, oil on linen, 2014

I have long been a fan of Luvon Sheppard’s work. His watercolors of Rochester capture the pulse of the city perfectly, with a high degree of technical excellence. He’s a man of faith, but he doesn’t beat the viewer over the head with it. It’s a great honor to be showing with him.

Interested in attending Dr. Romaine’s talks? The Symposium brochure is available here.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.

September 25, 2014

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?

Message me if you want information about next year’s classes and workshops.

January 24, 2014

The Sleep-Deprived Artist

Gail Kellogg Hope is an artist, clothing designer, and the mother of a new young son. I asked her to write about the trials of temporarily misplacing her career in favor of motherhood.

1170 Huntarian Psalter. Want to know how she’s getting stuff done? She tied the little bugger in his crib, that’s how. He’s not crying, so she must have drugged him. I’m a spinner who rarely gets to spin these days. It’s so rare I write about it on Facebook when it happens.

The sleep-deprived mommy haze isn’t enough fun and I can totally type with one hand. Two hours later the child is asleep in his crib, I have tea in my cup and may (possibly) be able to string a paragraph or five together.

Creative people have a hard time not being creative. I’m not sure why, but we just have to be making something all the time. When I had to go on light duty and bed rest with this pregnancy, I thought I’d go insane not doing anything.

For fun, I build solar dehydrators and travel to Maine to dye yarn with friends on my vacations, “What beach? You mean you want me to put down the power tools, sit down and relax? Why?”

Behold, the cuteness! The source of all lost attention spans!

So I found a project that did not tax my very limited physical capabilities. This turned out to be making knock-offs of medieval illuminated manuscripts. These are loose illustrations in watercolor/gouache, ink and gold paint. While they can get elaborate, they are not difficult. They are nice doodles that fulfill the creative need.

As a bonus, I get to look at the crazy drawings done by bored monks and nuns known as marginalia. These are the fart jokes, battle-of-the-sexes and political commentary of the times. They’re a look into the daily lives of real people. Lemme tell ya, the classic penis joke is classic, and I’d like to see the serious historian remain serious after that. “It isthe rabbit!” is much older than you thought. Take that, Monty Python!

Rainbow-color cloth book with fun textures, which didn’t cut it as a creative outlet, but you can read about it here.

Anyway, fast forward to today, and I’m a happy breastfeeding mommy-bed play mat. If I’m not nursing the kid I’m holding the sleeping baby. Do not move or he will wake up. Or, I’m attending to my son’s very important developmental needs: “Stack the block, knock it down! Tigger Rattle! ABCDEFG. Look, John Robert, Yellow! Yay!” Or trying to figure out how to make the crying stop.

While this is all very fun, that creative need is just not being met by making the kid a rainbow color cloth book with fun textures, which I did after managing to mommy-ninja him into The Dreaded Swing for a nap, pee, eat and somehow get up to the sewing room.

I call this The Puking Dragon.

So, back to the doodles: things that can easily be put away and picked up much later, fiddled with one-handed, and that don’t mean all that much in case of puke.

I’m so not a Pinterest Mommy. I’m lucky if I get a shower, three square meals and brush my teeth in the same day. I haven’t plucked my eyebrows in a month but I managed to nix the whiskers a few days ago. But the kid is clean, dry & fed by golly, and if we all have to wear mismatching socks, so be it.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

January 13, 2014

Let’s all raise a glass!

Tom and Catherine Bullinger will open The Victor Brewery to the public this Thursday.

Catherine Bullinger was the first person who ever signed up to take painting lessons with me. She still takes them today. She has an MBA and a very responsible corporate job, so when she told us that her dream job was to be a barmaid, we laughed. It turns out she was serious.

Tom is using locally-sourced grains and hops wherever possible. These hops were grown in Victor. I’m looking forward to painting the hop-fields next summer.

This Thursday, her husband Tom will officially open The Victor Brewery at 6606 State Route 96 in Victor, NY. Tom is one of those creative types who defy easy labels. He is a programmer but his passion is building things. He built his own kayaks and dining room set, and they’re exquisite. Then he moved on to building the brewing system, kettles, sanitizers, coolers, and furnishings for this brewery.

Tom made the brewing system and all the furnishings, including this bar and tapboard. I made the paintings of the upper and middle falls at Letchworth behind it. I imagine he’ll be working on the finishing touches right up to Thursday’s opening.

As Brewmaster, he builds the beer, too. The whole system is elegant, efficient, and computer-driven. “That’s the brains of the operation,” he said, pointing to his laptop sitting on a chair in the corner.

I bet when Catherine dreamed of tending bar, she never thought about devising systems of washing and disinfecting glasses. Almost unbelievably, Tom did not learn to blow glass and make his own barware.

I see no reason to waste calories on any food or drink that isn’t top-shelf. Since Tom made the beer for my daughter’s wedding rehearsal, I’ve had a chance to sample rather quite a bit of it, and I think it’s fantastic. I don’t know the language of beer, but let me describe it in my own terms: it’s effervescent and distinctive without being overwhelming, and it tastes fresh and alive.

Because of my recent surgery, I can’t lift. So I was forced to sit and quaff beer while Tom and my husband hung this show for me. Pity.

So when Tom and Catherine asked me to hang a landscape show for the Brewery’s opening, I was tremendously chuffed. I’d had to cancel a show in Maine in December because of my surgery, but Tom and my husband offered to do the heavy lifting while I sat at a table and drank beer.

I should have stayed and helped Catherine steam t-shirts.

Much of the work I’m showing is of local subjects like Keuka, the Erie Canal, Seabreeze, and the mouth of the Genesee. Others are of summery, beer-drinking kinds of places. It will be there through Victor Brewery’s grand opening in March; I hope you get a chance to stop by and raise a glass to it and maybe take home a growler as well. Hours are Thursday and Friday, 4-7 pm, and Saturday, 1-6. For more information, call (585)902-8166 or email [email protected].

The Victor Brewery is located at 6606 State Route 96 in Victor, NY and opens this coming Thursday.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!

December 26, 2013

Crazy artists

Pietà, (1498-99) Michelangelo. There’s been speculation that Michelangelo was somewhere on the autism spectrum. His hygiene was abysmal, he didn’t like talking to others, and he was monomaniacally focused on his work. And yet he exerted an unparalleled influence on western thinking, as a sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer.

I meet myself in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders with tiresome regularity. The creative personality (and I’m no exception) is frequently impulsive, non-conformist, and motivated by what less-enlightened minds might call fantasy.

In the past, people actually understood that as a thinking pattern. Today, we define impulsivity and fantastical thinking as personality disorders. No child with this personality type will be allowed through school without being subjected to a program of therapy and drugs to ‘normalize’ him or her.

The Yellow Christ, 1889, Paul Gauguin. Despite his success, Gauguin was certainly crazy by our standards, suffering from depression and alcoholism until he abandoned civilization for Tahiti, where he spent the last few years of his life painting in peace.

An exasperated educator once told my husband and me that they needed to prepare our kids for the “real world.” What does an educator know about reality? He works in a highly-regimented environment whose goals are not the goals of the larger world.

At the time, my husband was telecommuting with a Boston software start-up; I paint full time. Our “normal” wasn’t even in most people’s viewfinder. We didn’t have a typical life, but we certainly had a self-sufficient, productive and respectable one.

St. Catherine of Alexandria, 1595-1596, Caravaggio. Psychoanalyzing Caravaggio is a popular activity now, but there’s no doubt that even his contemporaries found him unsettling. The model for this painting was Fillide Melandroni, who posed for several works by Caravaggio. He tried to castrate her pimp, Tomassoni, and struck his femoral artery instead, killing him. Among the bully boys of 16^th century Rome, if a man insulted another man’s woman, the penalty was castration. It was an age of brawling, and any attempt to interpret it by our social code is bound to fail.

Our schools can’t cope with the creative kid who doesn’t fit into any mold. In the past, that child might have gone on to be a Bill Gates, Rachael Ray, or Ingvar Kamprad (founder of IKEA), but in the modern world, most avenues are closed to people without education.

Then there’s the question of what happens when something goes wrong. As a society, we have a knack for pathologizing absolutely normal human responses.

I have the personality of a terrier. I bite first and ask questions later; however, as with my dog, my instincts are usually spot-on. Like a watchdog, when things go wrong, I stay awake. Both times I have been sick, my first response was insomnia. That is commonly treated with antidepressants. I fell for that the first time, with awful results. This time, I’m recognizing my insomnia for what it is—a normal psychological reaction—and just enduring it.

Our ancestors used to formally identify the emotionally-bruised and set them apart so they didn’t have to experience the full thrust of human interaction. Nobody expected you to behave normally when you were traumatized, which in part obviated the need for antidepressants. Today we don’t even wear black to funerals; to wear it for a year after a loss is unthinkable. Yet, when one in ten Americans are taking antidepressants, one might conclude that unrecognized and unprocessed grief comes back to bite us.

Cats by Louis Wain. He spent time in an asylum, but his artistic skills never diminished. That indicates that whatever was going on, he wasn’t schizophrenic. Today he wouldn’t be considered mentally ill; he would be a star on social media, with its outsized interest in cats.

Similarly, there is a lot to make us anxious in the modern world. Every adolescent I’ve ever known has in some degree suffered from an anxiety disorder, because the natural state of the adolescent is anxiety. Much of this is emotional noise and just needs to be waited out. It’s helpful to point that out to a kid; it’s not as helpful to tell him that he’s fundamentally flawed and can only function with drugs.

More seriously, post-traumatic stress disorder is what happens when a healthy human mind is traumatized. How, then, is it an illness? Is it not in fact a normal response to an intolerable situation? If so, does it not make sense that the human mind also has an answer to it in its own depths? How useful is it to tell its sufferers that they’re somehow irretrievably broken, especially since there’s no good comprehensive treatment for PTSD?

In the past—ironically enough—the deeply traumatized individual might have been guided to write or paint or otherwise express his or her fears through creative expression. Too bad that we now want to just wipe that out with drugs.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!