You Calling My Art a Hobby?

Last Saturday was the first day of a figure drawing class at that Palette and Chisel. I loved every second of it. Each two-minute and five-minute sketch felt like a second, the hour-long pose felt like a minute. If we weren't offered a break, I wouldn't take one. It didn't matter whether my depictions sucked. It was three hours of peace, of breathing in and out and feeling whole and flowing.

The teacher is in his 40s tall and serious, there's a guy in the class in his 30s and there's two people in art school likely still in their teens and me. One of youngest asked me if "this"... art was a hobby? I took immediate offense at the question.  If I was in a sit com, I would've jumped back, ala Chandler, and said, "whahaha?" I had a reaction but it wasn't to her. My response filtered through years of other experiences. I know, because I recently took a mandated course at work called, Crucial Conversations and they said so.

Future - she didn't picture a future for me. She didn't see that I could be like her, in or considering a career. Old came next. She just met me and I presented as an old person. Okay, I'll give her older... 40 years or so. I could be two generations ahead of her. In my self-aware state I recognize that I don't say, even to myself, grandmother. I am definitely filtering. Then again, her choice of a word felt like a paper cut.

When I heard the word hobby,  it reminded me of an argument with my former husband about my business, when early in its life it wasn't making money. He called it a hobby. I took umbrage then too. He wanted me to close it. He wanted to take vacations. He wanted me to get a real job and not invest any more of our money into it. We discussed and argued. I realized he meant the future value of my earning power. The business gained momentum, but still, as new businesses go, required financial reinvestment. I stood my ground. A battle won... at all cost. He left and I dug in. I would
prove it was worth it. I completely retooled. I let go staff and refocused the business model. What business I was in was decided and the business took off and went on for another fifteen years. I may have proved him wrong, but I didn't prove me right. Damn.

Still mulling about the meaning of hobby, I asked my wise friend Lynn for her definition. She said, it's what brings us peak moments... when time stands still, where your mind finds rest. It's not work. Peace.

In an NPR's Morning Edition story recently, they asked rock-star scientist, Neil deGrasse Tyson to fact check the time (relativity) effects of gravity in the new movie Interstellar. The stronger the gravity, the more time slows. The time on our phones that go through the far out GPS satellites has to be calculated and slowed to account for the difference in the speed of time in space. My time is slowed when I'm drawn to drawing.

Now that I think about it, that young woman may have done me a big service. The word hobby for me obviously triggers a reaction. It's clearly time to rethink and retool, to find a response that speaks of my experience of flow, joy and peace.

Thanks for the provocative words, Kurt Vonnegut.

"If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something." Kurt Vonnegut

Cloud Atlas - Writing without a View to the Future

Introvert Mary speaks is what my friend Lonni called my writing after a recent posting. A high compliment, as I sharpen my focus and my pencil, so to speak, on expressing myself through a blog. She knows that I find people who know people I know in an elevator, network my chiropractor and hairdresser, facilitate webinars, give speeches, make campaign calls and other corporal works of extroversion. And, she knows every extrovert outpouring for me is like living in a klieg light, as a big font billboard that requires a sunlit, tiny font monitor to recharge and inform it.

Last night Alex and I saw Cloud Atlas. What a blast to see Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Jim Sturgess, Jim Broadbent and my favorite, Doona Bae working their way through five and more characters. Much of the story hinged on writings… love letters, an incendiary report, a journal, a badly written book, a book turned into a screen play… each affected the next act and another generation. Each author wrote in hopes of a certain audience and an intended impact. None… none realized the true influence. How would the 1800s journal writer long dead know when he wrote, that his journal published, bought by a composer and torn in half to steady a table would motivate a suicide by someone staying in the home with a rickety table? We don’t know what our writing wreaks.

The more I write, the more I need to write. Concepts, phrases, opening lines, sentences and paragraphs float through my brain. I wish someone would invent a shower keyboard to capture thoughts, but the waste of water, and the increase in late work starts could severely limit my livelihood. When I discovered the voice recorder on my Android, my world got a little better. Thank you to the *Dictaphone people who paved the way. Just think, I am benefitting from a process improvement that allowed a boss to speak his correspondence so a secretary could type it at her own typing speed. That last sentence reeks of old school... what is correspondence today? What is a secretary? What is word per minute typing? Here I am looking for easier ways to convey my correspondence... not unlike a thread of influence in Cloud Atlas.

Lonni chastised me today for not putting notices on FaceBook that I posted a new blog. First, she complained, like a dutiful friend, that she now had sixty blog posts to read. Then she confessed she felt like a slug, guilty and angry at herself, that she should be writing. (I agree with her… she is a fabulous, down to the bone, writer. Or, as my mother, whose only swear was “damn” would say, quiturbitchin’. Get to it!) My blog posts aren’t, until this very moment, about telling people to write, but that’s what the last posting about aging, sorting and moving rendered.

Writing like much of art is a solitary act that requires an audience. As a writer, I may have a specific audience in mind… a person or a group. I could layer on top ambition for the writing to have influence, to sway, to cause change, so I seek opportunities for distribution of my writing through publishing, but I don't. Today, I’ll take the chastisement. For my blog, being followed is the highest compliment. I appreciate a “share”. A written comment makes my post a conversation and feeds Extrovert Mary, and  a “like” is something to be liked. Any response recharges Introvert Mary. 



*History of Dictaphone