old age Archives | Carol L. Douglas

March 28, 2019

Intimations of mortality

You can have it all. You’d just better be prepared to work very hard.

Clouds over Teslin Lake, Yukon Territory, by Carol L. Douglas. We did some icy camping here.

I recently was rejected from a residency I really wanted, in Gates of the Arctic National Park. (Rejection is how these things roll, so don’t worry about my feelings.) I’ve spent three months doing intensive training to ensure I could backpack my gear in the mountains. While I don’t think they discriminated on the basis of age, I will always wonder if it was a factor. Sixty-year-olds, in conventional wisdom, are not fit enough to climb mountains north of the Arctic Circle.

My physical therapist saw no reason I couldn’t meet the demands of the residency, as long as I worked hard, which I have. Not being chosen changes nothing in my fitness routine. Two of the other residencies I’ve applied to are also remote and arduous. And I have plans to paint in Scotland in May and in Patagonia next March. I don’t want my body to be a barrier to success.

This is the northernmost place I’ve ever painted, just a few miles from Gates of the Arctic National Park.

Meanwhile, I watch with some stupefaction as some of my peers move to senior living, take early retirement, or capitulate to the crippling disorders of a sedentary lifestyle. I feel good and I’m not bored. Why would I not want to keep rolling?

There have been at least four times in my life when I’ve been closer to death than I am today. (If I’m wrong about that, enjoy a hearty laugh at my expense.) The first was as a teen, when I did something so monumentally stupid that I could have killed both myself and my horse. The second was when I had an undiagnosed cancer that metastasized. The third and fourth times were when I hemorrhaged after surgery.

Another friend is 52. She’s stuck working because she’s an indispensable cog in the family business. When I said I had no interest in retirement, she was gobsmacked. “But why?” she asked. “You only have two more years!” (Actually, I have almost seven more years until I can take so-called “full retirement,” but that’s irrelevant.)

Blueberry barrens, Clary Hill, oil on canvas, by Carol L. Douglas. This is at Maine Farmland Trust Gallery until May 24.

It turns out that she doesn’t really want to retire; she wants to write books instead of keeping them. That’s a career change, and it’s something I heartily endorse.

Young readers, you’ll reach not one but many forks in the road. At each juncture, you can choose between security and risk. If you’re not courageous enough to take risks at 20, 30, or 40, when are you going to develop courage?

Choices don’t end when you enter the work force. I know many fine artists and musicians who combine their work with careers and/or child-rearing. Sometimes, however, people can only make drastic changes after their pension kicks in.

I have a student right now who is a retired Army officer. She went to art school in her youth but chose a military nursing career. Since retiring, she pours her energies into being the best painter she can be. Because she’s dedicated, she’s succeeding. And I bet it keeps her young long after her peers have subsided into their final rest.

Blueberry barrens, Clary Hill, watercolor, by Carol L. Douglas. This is at Maine Farmland Trust Gallery until May 24.

I have two paintings in the Joseph A. Fiore Art Center Residents Exhibit at Maine Farmland Trust Gallery, 97 Main Street, Belfast, ME. The show runs until May 24, with artist talks on Friday, May 24 at 5 PM. I hope you have a chance to stop and see this work.

February 22, 2019

Am I too old for this?

If you want to do something, the time to start is today.

Flood tide, by Carol L. Douglas

A few years ago, I read about a retrospective show for a 103-year-old painter from Staten Island named Margaret Ricciardi. “She can’t still be alive,” I thought to myself. After all, she was born only three years after my own grandmother, and I’m a grandmother myself.

Yes, Mrs. Ricciardi is still kicking. Furthermore, she has a website, and it’s glossy and well-designed. I’m being passed on the highway of commerce by a woman 45 years my senior.

Pine and spruce on the Barnum Brook Trail, by Carol L. Douglas

Margaret Ricciardi’s parents and husband were immigrants from the same small Italian town. After marrying in 1937, the couple started a shoe repair business in the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. It eventually expanded to include a handbag and shoe boutique.

At the age of 70, Ricciardi started taking classes at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. Two years later, she enrolled full time. At age 75, she earned her BA in Studio Art. She continued to study at the college and elsewhere and in 2017 was awarded an honorary doctorate.

Tricky Mary in a Pea Soup Fog, by Carol L. Douglas

At an age when her peers were looking into long-term care insurance, Mrs. Ricciardi blazed off into the unknown. I’m sure there were skeptics, or reactions of amused tolerance, but she managed to work more than thirty years after graduation from art school. That’s a full second career.

We don’t all have great genes, but if you’re passionate about something, you will live a better, longer life. Research shows that not only does making art extend our lifespans, but that this has been true throughout history.

I have a very unique painting class this winter. Because it’s on Tuesday mornings, only one person is still working; all the rest have retired. They are truly passionate about what they’re doing. They meet on Mondays to sketch, Tuesdays for class, and Wednesdays for figure drawing. With all this practice, they’re progressing at warp speed. In turn, I’m scrambling to keep up with them.

Dead Wood, by Carol L. Douglas

“Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance,” wrote David Mamet. (Well, not at football, I thought, but then remembered this year’s Super Bowl winners.)

The retiree has advantages in the race to excellence. He’s not worried about earning his bread. He recognizes how brief and precious life is. He isn’t all caught up in the emotional muddles of youth. And he takes the long view on nearly everything. These make it easier to sit down and flow into painting.

Of course, those are also attitudes young people can adopt if they wish. The younger you start doing what you love, the more years you’ll have to enjoy it.

May 11, 2017

She’s Not There (yet)

Extreme old age seems liberating for many artists, who are finally able to take risks they couldn’t contemplate when they were younger.

Drunkenness of Noah, 1515, Giovanni Bellini (then 85)

The Duke of Edinburgh recently announced that he will be retiring soon after his 96th birthday. Either he has remarkable genes or his expectations are radically different from the gaffers I know. Most people are anxious to quit working as soon as they can.

On the other hand, artists, like royalty, are bound by noblesse oblige. In other words, we must act in a way that conforms to our position and reputation. But how long can we keep it up?

Last night I toddled over to Northampton, MA to see the final show of the 1960s British rock band, the Zombies. They played their 1968 album Odessey and Oracle from start to finish one last time, after which they’re all moving on to something else.

Toward Another Light, 1985, Marc Chagall (then 97)

This was not a PBS special reunion band, where they prop up one aging member of a long-gone band and pad him with a backing orchestra. All four surviving players were present. Of these, Rod Argent, Hugh Grundy and Colin Blunstone turn 72 this year. Chris White is 74. Jim Rodford, who plays with them now, is 76.

They continue to play to the highest standard of musicianship, a standard that most young artists will never achieve, let alone maintain.

On the day before he died at the age of 97, Marc Chagall produced his last work, a lithograph entitled Toward Another Light. A portrait of his younger self with his late wife Bella is handing him a bouquet, while the Angel of Death waits to receive him. That’s what you might call a strong finish.

Cover of Jazz, 1947, by Henri Matisse, 1947. Matisse was bedridden after abdominal cancer at age 72. He turned to cutting colored paper. Jazz was completed when he was 74.

A striking number of artists have been highly productive late into old age, including Giovanni Bellini (who died at 86), Michelangelo (89), Titian (86 or 88), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, (86), Claude Monet(86), Henri Matisse (84), Joan Miró (90), Pablo Picasso (91), and Georgia O’Keeffe (98).

Faith Ringgold, who is now 86, drew the connection between visual arts and musicianship in an ArtNews interviewin 2013. “You’ve got to do just like the musicians do, you’ve got to practice every day,” she said. “I plan to do that for the rest of my life, practice every day.”

Google’s 12th Birthday, 2010 Wayne Thiebaud (then 89)

Wayne Thiebaud, who will be an eye-watering 97 this year, pointed out the relationship between physical well-being and creative control. “The plumb line in the body gives us a sense of things like grace or awkwardness or tension.”

Extreme old age seems liberating for many artists, who are finally able to take risks they couldn’t contemplate when they were younger.

“Working becomes your own little Eden,” Thiebaud said. “You make this little spot for yourself. You don’t have to succeed. You don’t have to be famous. You don’t have to be obligated to anything except that development of the self.”

January 6, 2017

Two old-timers debate the future

“Barge Haulers on the Volga (Burlaki), 1870–73, Ilya Repin

Last night I heard from an old friend. I met him through his kids, who are of an age with mine. He’s 57 years old and leaving next week for Puerto Rico to start graduate school. “It depends on my mother and my kids,” he said, “but my intention is to leave the country to teach English.”

My home town of Buffalo has been clinically depressed since the middle of the last century. This makes it a great place to be from. Either you left at 18 or you slog it out until retirement, at which time you escape the snow and taxes by moving to Florida, the Carolinas, or Arizona. (Sound familiar?)

Portrait of the Artist’s Mother at 63,” 1514, Albrecht Dürer

In 1917, George Eastman built the Eastman Dental Dispensary to provide dental care to indigent children. It’s been closed for a while, but is now being converted to low-cost housing for seniors. “Do you realize I qualify to live in that place?” my friend asked. I myself can’t imagine a more depressing place to end my years, since there isn’t a decent store in miles. It would be day after day of hobbling painfully through slushy downtown streets to one’s bus stop while impatient New Yorkers sound their horns. Give me the village almshouse any day.

When America was still a rural Arcadia, old timers lived with their kids. As a person’s capacity for hard physical labor slowly declined, they were assigned less onerous tasks, like child care, sewing, cooking and gardening.

“Old man sleeping,” 1872, Nikolaos Gyzis

The Industrial Revolution really messed this up. There is no room for Grandma or Grandpa in urban America. Our kids live in very small flats, if they’re not working in Hong Kong. There are no fireplaces, and no babies to dandle on one’s knee.

It was actually the Great Depression that rang the death knell for multi-generational families. Faced with a choice of providing for children or parents, the only solution for America’s poorest families was to send Granny to the poorhouse. These locally-financed institutions were—as were a lot of things then—overburdened and meager. The terrible condition of America’s elderly in the 1930s is why we ended up with our current Social Security system.

“Old Woman Dozing,” 1656, Nicolaes Maes

The problem is, we’re living longer and longer, and we’re healthier while we do it. According to the nifty Social Security life expectancy calculator, I should live until 86; my friend until 83 (someone ought to do something about that actuarial gender bias, by the way). Assuming we retain our marbles, there’s time for a whole second career there.

That’s especially true in a society which is making its workers redundant not at 65, but at 50 or 55. By delaying our Social Security benefits until 66 and 10 months, the government has told my age cohort that it wants us working longer. It hasn’t, however, given us any means of forcing someone to keep employing us.

On the other hand, twenty, thirty or forty years is just way too long to spend playing golf. So what’s a poor rebellious Son of Toil to do? Head elsewhere. Reinvent oneself. Do something meaningful.

Take up painting, obviously.

November 16, 2016

A question of identity

Self-portrait having surgical stitches removed. I asked to remove one myself, just to see how it was done.

I have survived two different cancers. The first one showed up in my 40th year, but a gastroenterologist dismissed the bleeding as running-related hemorrhoids. (Yes, I once was really that active.) In his mind, I was too young and too vegetarian for it to be colon cancer. By the time it was properly diagnosed, the tumor had breached the bowel wall. What could have been a quick snip ended up being a year of intensive treatment.

My second cancer was much less dramatic. Again it started with internal bleeding, this time from a uterine tumor. Those parts had all been pretty well microwaved during my first treatment, so they just took them all out.

The oddity wasn’t just having two cancers; it was having them younger than the age recommended by the NIH. I was tested for Lynch Syndrome, or hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer, as it used to be called. Unsurprisingly, it came up positive.

I’m pretty larky, so when people asked me if I was journaling about my experiences, I told them I was writing a book called One Hundred Best Things about Having Cancer. (Number one, of course, was getting out of leading Youth Group.) Yeah, I was likely to die of cancer, but we’re all going to die of something. In practical terms, nothing really changed. I was already being screened aggressively, and it didn’t change that.

But deep down it affected my thinking. I’m a carrier of cancer, I told myself. I may have given this to my children. I don’t have an infinite amount of time left. I have to hurry to finish what I’ve set out to do.

This year I decided I was sick of defining myself as a cancer survivor. I know too many people who are entering old age in prisons of health problems to want to build one for myself. It’s not like I can just pretend it never happened, because all that treatment radically changed my body. But I wouldn’t talk or think about it anymore. I no longer needed to see my life through a lens of cancer.

Pastor Alvin Parris of Joy Community Church in Rochester, NY. He’s a talented musician and preacher, and he aims to finish the race strong.

Then, late this summer, I got another letter from my geneticist. It said they’d had another look-see at my profile and decided that my gene mutation wasn’t really Lynch Syndrome after all. Never mind.

Practically speaking, that changes little. I still go regularly to Rochester to be poked and prodded. But it does raise the question asked in Isaiah 53:1: “Who has believed our report? And to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?”

Pastor Alvin Parris in Rochester, NY has been on dialysis since I met him. He is physically frail, but his inner power just glows. Last week his son commented, “Every time I hear my dad preach, I think about how the doctor told him that by the time he was 50, preaching was one of the many things he would no longer be able to do. He’s 65 now.”

That’s a role model for our generation.

June 16, 2013

No mandatory retirement or forced disability for painters

Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway, by Joseph Mallord William Turner, was completed in 1844, when the artist was 69 years old. Turner moved fully into the free, expressive, colorful treatment at an age when most modern Americans have retired.

Two lifelong friends have recently entered hospice—one with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease) and one with metastatic breast cancer. Despite my grief, I can’t help but smile each time I hear from them. In both cases, the closer they get to physical shipwreck, the more joyous they become.

Another friend mentioned a similar phenomenon in church this morning: for some believers, the older they get, the more their spiritual disabilities are stripped away and the more they are able to enter into their spiritual gifts.

Tate Britain’s upcoming show, Late Turner: Painting Set Free, on the last works of J.M.W. Turner, illustrates a similar phenomenon in the visual arts. Turner moved fully into his romantic, free, expressive, colorful best at a time when most modern people have retired.

Flowers in a Crystal Vase, by Édouard Manet, was painted in 1882, when he was bedbound with gangrene.

Édouard Manet died of gangrene at the age of 51, two years after completing his final tour de force, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. In his last months he was bed-bound, so he painted still lives of the flowers in his sickroom. These intimate, small, perfectly observed paintings are among his finest works.

In 1941 Henri Matisse was diagnosed with duodenal cancer, which left him with a stoma and confined to a wheelchair. As he began to recover from treatment, his ex-wife and daughter were arrested by the Gestapo; Mme. Matisse remained in prison for six months, while Marguerite was tortured and sent to a concentration camp (from which she ultimately escaped). After this, Matisse entered what he called une seconde vie (a second life). For fourteen years, he worked in cutout paper. These works are among the most influential and frequently cited of Matisse’s entire career.

Polinesia, the Sky, by Henri Matisse, 1947

What is it about artistic maturity that—like spiritual maturity—often catches its practitioners at the end of their lives? For example why did Rembrandt become so deeply reflective in his old age (and why did he paint so many self-portraits at an age when most people have given them up)? Perhaps old age and illness result in freedom from the tyranny of personally-imposed goals. Despite the enfants terrible we tend to lionize in American culture, perhaps artistic genius is truly the province of the elderly.

August and September are sold out for my workshop at Lakewatch Manor in Rockland, ME… and the other sessions are selling fast. Join us in June, July and October, but please hurry! Check here for more information.