Living in the OW
Perspectives from The Artist's Road
I recently suffered a debilitating injury to my neck, which will require wearing a brace for several months until my “Hangman’s Fracture” can heal up. Although It sounds far worse than it is, I still have had to change my world around to accommodate my restricted mobility. This is a challenge for any creative person, at any stage of life, especially for those, like myself, who have always painted on their feet, walking back and forth all day from palette to easel. It will be some weeks before I am able to paint again, even sitting. What to do?
I am seventy-two this year, still physically fit, aware of time slipping away, and motivated by the many, many things I wish to say in my art. It has taken me a lifetime to get here and to understand what is important to say and share, and I am suddenly sidelined from my goals. Frustrating. Challenging. Perhaps even life-changing, but strangely, not depressing. Some part of me recognizes that this is an uninvited opportunity to once again look for creative opportunities which I would not otherwise have discovered. This is not the first time in my fifty-plus years of living the “artist’s life” that I have been forced by one thing or another to flex into something different or new. Always before, that uncomfortable new direction resulted in a widening of my artistic world into new forms of expression, new tools and new avenues of thinking creatively. Why should this chapter be any different?
So here I am, thinking that I can also express myself with my writing instead of painting. Sixteen years ago, when we started The Artist’s Road website, we wanted to acknowledge that this life is a journey, not an end point. It is time to recognize that many folks in my age group are probably also experiencing or have had some health issues, maybe significant, in some cases. Living and working with chronic pain is difficult, but giving up the creative life is even more painful to contemplate. It is a common occurrence with aging artists. Renoir had to tape his brushes to his arthritic hands to paint. See The Artist’s Hands. Bed-ridden Matisse turned to cutting shapes out of colored paper to create astonishing new paintings and stained glass church windows. See The Best is Yet to Come. Chuck Close suffered from dyslexia and prosopagnosia (face-blindness), which left him unable to recognize or remember faces, even his own. That disability led him to develop his grid system for painting his signature giant portraits. Years later, he had to strap brushes to his wrist after a stroke put him in a wheel chair. He often spoke about how his disabilities forced him to develop his unique techniques and turn his limitations into assets.
What creative challenges have you faced and how did you adapt to them?
Best,
John
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