Laura Turner Archives | Carol L. Douglas

March 12, 2021

Artist with the soul of an accountant

There are some unique lessons to be found in the detritus of our COVID-year returns.

Cerro Fitz Roy and Cerro Electrico, painted in my extended sojourn in Patagonia last year. Available.

I like to tell people I’m an artist with the soul of accountant. This isn’t really true; I’m just making fun of my painting. I hate bookkeeping as much as the next guy.

This time of year, my accountant friend Laura Turner is doing a lot of tax returns. She likes it because each one is a small bit of history. I don’t share her enthusiasm for slogging through the minutiae of the tax code (which changes constantly), but auditing your own books does take you back.

Last year I wrote a lot of refund checks—$4,550.40 worth, to be precise. These were deposits for workshops, and they all went in a flurry in late Spring, as we realized the world was not going to open back up again. They represented future payments as well. Compared to others, my losses were small, but for me they were painful.

Cliffs, painted in Patagonia last year. Available.

My computer tells me to whom I issued those refunds. More than 80% of them turned around and bought something else from me during 2020—another workshop, a class, or a painting. There’s a lesson in that, one we can learn from our retail neighbors.

Modern big-box stores are open and easy about taking returns. Buy it, take it home and contemplate it. If you don’t like it, return it. My late friend Gwendolyn used to call it “buying on the American plan,” which tells you it’s not universal. It’s possible here because these retailers work in volumes so large that the cost of this goodwill gesture is relatively small.

Powerhouse on the Rio Blanco, painted in Patagonia last year. Available.

That is not true for the sole proprietor, whose operation may include unrecoverable deposits and expenses. But it’s still a good idea to issue refunds cheerfully when you can. It establishes your integrity and goodwill.

I’m conservative by nature. I prefer to do business as I always have. But in April 2020, I was forced to rethink that. Every gallery I did business with was closed, either permanently or temporarily.

I made my first diffident step in buying a license for something called ‘Zoom’. By June, I was confident enough to convert that to an annual license. It was the best investment I’ve ever made.

Rain, painted in Patagonia last year. Available.

That month, I also bought a party tent and opened an ad hoc gallery in my driveway. I went on to have the best sales year I’ve ever had. Nobody is more surprised about that than me, but it speaks to a second essential truth: we usually have to be smacked upside the head to make positive change.

I think citizens should prepare their own tax returns so they have a notion of how the tax code actually works. My fellow Americans don’t agree; in 2018, only 43% of electronic filers did their own returns. Even those who use a tax preparer are responsible for laying out the bones of their story. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say.

I always hover above the ‘send’ key for a few moments, hoping I’ve remembered every important thing. Itemized returns are never perfect; there are always bits and bobs you mislaid and just don’t recall. But hopefully, I’ve written it more as a memoir and less as a novel.

May 2, 2017

The polygamy wars

I was called to jury duty yesterday. I can’t tell you about that, but I can tell you about a different case.

14-year-old Elissa Wall in her wedding dress.

I flunked voir dire. I always do, darn it, and I take it personally. Still, I’ve answered the summons and met my civic responsibilities in time to paint Ladona. She was expected to haul yesterday.

Jurors are not permitted to discuss cases outside of the courtroom. I won’t even tell you what court I was in, except to mention that it’s a long drive from my house.

Instead, I’ll tell you about a trial from the last decade, and how I came to be hooked up with a bunch of Texas hell-raisers. Texas women are not like women from the Northeast. They’re pretty blunt, Sugar.

For me it started with a devastating house fire in the Bronx in 2007, where nine children and one woman were killed. Apparently, few other New Yorkers were troubled by the open practice of polygamy in our state. One was Dr. Susan Stickevers from Downstate Medical Center, who had professional experience with the damage to women that polygamy causes. We became friends.

Like his father, Warren Steed Jeffs liked ’em young.

Polygamy is antithetical to feminism because it denies women property rights. It’s miserable for men and boys, too. But the worst part is that, because a small number of men monopolize the available women, it inevitably ends up involving child brides.

In 2008, the state of Texas raided the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) Yearning for Zion Ranch. The initial response was a naive plea for religious tolerance. Oprah Winfrey, National Geographic, the New York Times, and other media heavyweights painted portraits of simple, gentle, homeschooling people who were being persecuted for their faith. Blonde, dressed in pastel prairie dresses or homespun cotton work clothes, the FLDS were nothing if not photogenic.

If you want to point a finger back to the advent of “truthiness”, that’s as good a place as any to start.

One of Jeffs’ ‘wedding pictures,’ with a pubescent child.

The best coverage was in the Salt Lake (Utah) Tribune, which is probably the only major American newspaper to have a section on polygamy. Inevitably, in those pre-Facebook days, battles raged in the comments. There was a pitched war between the supporters of polygamy and its foes. It included experts and it often spilled over into the news pages themselves. I ‘met’ many outspoken antipolygamy activists, including Carolyn Jessop, Flora Jessop, Elissa Wall, Sam Brower and many others.

One intrepid lawyer—I won’t share her name—anonymously published the court documents online. It was a wonderful corrective to all those rose-tinted reports from the mainstream press.

In April, 2009, Laura Turner invited a bunch of us—total strangers—to her cabin in Texas hill country. We spent a long weekend talking and drinking whiskey left over from the last session of the Texas legislature. Internet alliances became real-world friendships.

The turning point in public opinion came with the courtroom evidence brought by then-Attorney General Greg Abbott and his team. An audiotape of Warren Jeffs raping a 12-year-old girl resulted in the conviction of twelve men. Yearning For Zion Ranch was abandoned.

Texas had succeeded where several other states and the Federal government had failed. They exposed a child sex-trafficking ring that ran from Mexico to Canada. Sadly, only Canada acted on the information, and then only imperfectly.

Jeffs raped his victims in this cell in YFZ Ranch.

Meanwhile, in Utah, nothing much has changed. Just this month, the courts slapped the hands of nine defendants for misdirecting SNAP benefits to their FLDS bishop. I shudder to imagine the penalties had the perpetrators been a black, inner city church.

Last week I learned that one of my pals from the Polygamy Wars has died. She lived a good life, and she fought the good fight. I hope that she—and we—turned the tide of public opinion, at least just a bit.

September 13, 2013

Answering the artist within you

Beads by Laura Turner

I have taught enough students who waited until retirement to take up painting that I always joke that when I retire, I’m taking up accounting. In fact, I have several accountant friends who do some kind of art on the side—a forensic accountant who draws, a CPA who writes comics, and a small-business accountant who makes beaded jewelry.

The last, Laura Turner, recently bought a small kiln to make fused-glass beads of her own design. What makes someone suddenly feel the urge to make jewelry? “I needed something besides reading to entertain myself while I recovered from major abdominal surgery,” she told me. “With a rectangular plastic cake carrying box, I could sit in bed to do it and lose very few beads in the covers.”

Well, there are lots of things one can do in bed that don’t involve small objects. And how do you go from stringing someone else’s beads to making your own?

Bead by Laura Turner

“Making a piece of jewelry from scratch, not using pre-manufactured focals and findings, is much more satisfying, she said. “It’s also much more time-consuming. So it’s an adventure again, whereas beading alone had begun to be something of a chore.”

As all artists know, new disciplines mean new costs. “There’s always another tool needed.” Considering it’s just baked sand, glass is remarkably expensive, she says. “Because I live out in the sticks, most of my purchases are online, so I incur shipping costs as well. As much as I love buying on the internet, the truth is that sometimes what you get is not what you thought you were getting.”

Of course she’s eyeing a bigger kiln now. She’s an artist.

I asked her what she gets out of the process. “A sense of achievement, a sense of completion. A sense of embracing the colors I’m working with, and the feeling that whatever I make somehow expresses something inside me,” she answered.

Join me in October, 2013 at Lakewatch Manor—which is selling out fast—or let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in 2014. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!