If not now, when? If not you, who?
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| The Late Bus, 6X8, oil on canvasboard, $435, available through Camden Public Library this month. |
āImagination without follow-through is mere fantasy,ā pastor Quinton Self said on Sunday, making me almost drop my sketchbook in a shock of self-recognition. I have a good idea nearly every day. Iāve learned to ignore them and focus on my core mission (painting) but for decades I was bedeviled by ideas I couldnāt execute.
Until I was 40, that included painting itself. I was too tied to making a living to have time for my lifeās work. How my husband (and cancer) helped me escape that is a story for another day. However, I do know the intense longing of staring through the shop window at the world of art and longing to be allowed in.
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| Owl’s Head early morning, 8X16, oil on linenboard, $722 unframed. |
There are many reasons why we defer our creative dreams. Greatest among them is fear of failure. Somewhere in the business of learning a discipline, we face the fact that what we create will never match what weāve dreamed. In our minds, weāre all brilliant artists; in reality, weāre all somewhat impeded. Thatās a good thing, too, because the gap between what we see and what we execute is what the world calls āstyleā.
Nevertheless, the fear of mediocrity stops many people from starting at all. They defer their dreams to some future time. Their most common excuse is that theyāre too busy right now. Thereās a meme that reads, ābeing an adult is just saying āBut after this week things will slow down a bit againā to yourself until you die.ā Iām not saying that our responsibilities are not real, but, to some degree, we all insulate ourselves in a cocoon of busy-work.
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| Lonely Cabin, 8X10, oil on canvasboard, available through Camden Public Library this month. |
Weāre all mediocre when we startāif weāre lucky. Some of us are truly terrible. You have to get through that phase in order to start being good, and you have to get through being merely good in order to be great. Thatās the nature of every worthwhile venture.
We never know, when we start, where weāre going to end up on the continuum between awful and greatness. Thatās played out over time. As a teacher, I canāt tell either. But I can tell where a person will end up if he never picks up a tool and starts working: heāll remain a fantasist until his dying day.
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| Nocturne, 9X12, oil on canvasboard, $869 framed. |
Painters hear the same comments over and over from people who stop to talk to us, so much that there is a small cottage industry of jokes about them. The one that strikes me as terribly poignant is, āI used to paint, but thenā¦ā
My father, in a sense, was one of those people. He had a scholarship to art school, but enlisted for World War II. He became a photographer and then a psychologist and painted on the side (and taught me). He intended to pursue painting in retirement, but by then the fire had been damped by tragedy.
I recently put a deposit down for a walking trip along Hadrianās Wall in Britain. Yes, I know that travel restrictions are tightening; we live in uncertain times. But as I explained to my daughter, I donāt have any guarantees that in two years, or five, Iāll be strong enough to hike 75 miles. None of us are guaranteed a future.
I am reminded of two questions asked by a former pastor, Tony Martorana, that have resonated with me over the years:
āIf not now, when?ā
āIf not you, who?ā
Of course, pastors Tony and Quinton were talking about something far greater than mere art, but the point is universal. What are you going to do with the next year?
I canāt leave this subject without a plug for my workshops and classes; sorry about that.