Joie de Faire

The biggest takeaway of the day is…

to live a happy fulfilling creative life you must possess pride without ego.

I didn’t intend that as the end point, though I did plan and facilitate the panel that got us there, selecting artists, all of them over 60, to join me in discussing how their creativity has progressed with their age. Organically, we arrive at the end of our time with this conclusion.

The whole panel agrees, making feels good: making for you, making for others, making to never receive credit, or making for a million bucks (wouldn’t that be nice?). We all agree art is a language we innately understand, though how we have come to that understanding couldn’t be more different.

Everyone except Gilda expresses moments of self doubt. Joan is the most similar to me between her, Kathy, Karrolyn, Omi, and Gilda. Kathy is and has been in an advanced state of liberation that feels very far from my mental state, though it is something I aspire to. Omi and I are similar in our showmanship when we teach, but she likes to spend more time alone than I do, for now. Maybe I’ll get there one day, to a level of self sufficience that not only feels easeful and necessary, but also delightful and chosen. Karrolyn cannot be compared to any other human being I have ever met. If I am ever to strike up a similarity between us, it will only be in the circumstance of deciding to have kids without first being married. That hasn’t even happened to me.

Gilda is too dedicated for me to pretend we have anything in common. She’s involved in a cross section of city wide activist organizations and her commitments to them have seemingly never taken a back seat to her art making. She cannot turn away from the struggle of the lives she has lived here and the others she has witnessed. I try not to compare my creative impulses. As far as creation goes, I’m in it for the thrill or the “joie de faire” as another artist names it.

Always when I run panels, I wish I was listening more, but it’s hard to cater to an audience, orchestrate a discussion, and really make meaning for yourself at the same time, simultaneously and seamlessly reflecting back and moving forward. In this mode, I am a weaver as much as a story teller. I am bringing together the threads of separate lives to remind everyone engaged we are not so separate.

“So many people are so much better than me”, Joan says at one point. There is hierarchy to grapple with and money, and then the fact that we all identify as artists and women: easier for me with each passing day, but never easy. I’d rather exist without identity, but I’ll have to wait for the next life for that.

I think I thought I’d feel like I’m arriving in some new life with no office to go to, but even when I don’t go to work I like to do the same things in cycles. In the process of the panel, the artists describe falling in and out of love many times with these cycles of what they feel compelled to do to make. Joan gets wind from a friend of a friend that I’m leaving my job and privately invites me over for lunch, because no matter what cycle your creativity is calling for, there’s always time for lunch.

Omi talks about sitting in classes motivated towards a professional certificate, daydreaming in numerical calculations about how many pairs of earrings sold would equal one months rent. Her son was young, but the haggling aspect of selling work at maker markets was endlessly degrading. Her price was never the one accepted.

Omi tells us about a lightbulb moment of discovering she can teach and, in that, always be learning instead of having to sell work constantly. You can make a piece of art on your own, but what we make when we teach is the opportunity for endless making, a constant ebb and flow of absorbing what you learn from life and translating it into lessons for others to imbue into the making of their lives. In the most ideal circumstance, teachers receive support to extend support. Lately, most institutions that employ teachers fail to provide adequate support that allows any internal learning to extend out. There is no time to make meaning for the teacher, let alone for the class they stand in front of.

The panel discussion finds incidental climax when everyone reaches this point, all five of these artists, in their life where they fully accept, in every facet of their process, that they are good at what they do and that, more importantly, they are committed to always doing more learning.

When we make art, we make something that means something to us. We behave to cultivate something special. In our panel, Joan mentions a deeply informative essay, The Pleasure of Meaning and Making by Ellen Dissanyake. Dissanyake, like Sylvia Winter, believes art is a biological necessity in human existence. Sylvia takes it one breath further noting that story becomes our DNA. The making is expression of understanding, the expression of understanding becomes how we act in our lives together as time trundles forward.

Dissanyake says there is a more natural way of art and life that contemporary people have departed from. My understanding of this through experience, despite the fact that I love these artists and running these kinds of panel discussions, is why I will be leaving my job. My job is not giving enough space in my life for art to naturally arrive. I am behaving to maintain an ever accumulating amount of tasks within the framework of systems that do not serve to help the people that my job is meant to help.

Most of the additional work that I take on is, at it’s core, motivated by proving things to philanthropic organizations. I feel like I spend a lot of time at work collecting evidence to prove things that I feel the philanthropy class of New York should innately know, like paying professional artists to be a resource to people living with chronic illness is a good use of money

We shouldn’t have to prove it. We really shouldn’t have to collect the harrowing stories, the legacy bequests, and absorb the overwhelming concerns about bankruptcy from medical debt year after year, and decade after decade. That’s not in my job description, but neither is a quarter of the other weekly work I’m saddled with. I give six months notice to my employers and as word of my departure spreads, not a single person asks why I am leaving. I wonder if it is because it is not surprising or because I am not close with my colleagues. The artists that provide our programs aren’t employees, but they know so much more about my life because they always ask questions. With them, there is always time for questions and it makes me feel so loved.

To make something and to make it special, special if only to you, is a distinct human impulse. Proving it is special to yourself or anyone else is a chore. Lately, in all of my relationships, I feel I am obsessed with creating new distinct cultures to exist only for the parties involved, and in this is am finding that making something special can easily become the process of proving. Striking comparison these days make my skin crawl, but I can’t help it. I do it in the present, past, and future tense and it scrambles me, but sometimes I feel a strange scarcity with the tools of the trade of writing.

In The Pleasure of Meaning and Making by Ellen Dissanyake also states “it can even be said that, unlike other species, we use tools not just functionally but, even as babies, to leave our mark on the world, to achieve our ideas”. Once upon a time, she helps us understand, art embodied the norms of a culture, articulating its deepest values, tributing the special and the day to day as equally valuable.

The community I have come into through this job will far outlast my tenure at it, I cannot degrade community to just a tool, but it has been a lab for me to understand what I value most. The lab has changed since COVID which splintered my creative community sending my peers in their 20’s and 30’s out of New York across the world. Even those who remain in the city are busier, more exhausted, and more out of touch with the social animal that exists in us all.

As much as I would like to be making community, perhaps there is more learning to be done independently before I bring it forth to the community. The community is changed and I don’t know what it needs any more so I decide to leave and then return to reinvest.

After my last day of employment (for now) has come and gone, I go to Joan’s for lunch, a send off of sorts, but mostly a check in since I’ll be back in June. She’s had a series of falls that have kept her in bed for the last few months. When I knock, she swings the door wide open and springs forth with delicious questions while she settles me into a seat at her dining room. There is a feast for the eyes set out across the table: pastel and charcoal works peek out from wax paper. They look nothing like what she wanted to display for the panel six months prior.

When she asks me really what motivated my decision to leave, I share my thoughts on the contrast of the other lives being built and stabilized with each passing day that I intersect with. I realize I’m mostly talking about everyone but me, and mostly in comparison. My brother and the friends I grew up with are having kids, buying homes, and developing a life of permanency. The only thing I really had to do I have eliminated, but in making this bold choice I feel even more committed to an ordinary sequence of tasks to grow the existence of my ideas and the meaning of my life.

“I guess I’m choosing to stand for myself.”

Joan shifts a piece of work and smiles at something familiar to her.

“Humans are all made so differently.”

Joan has a brother like mine, a family man. Her work is well loved, and respected. In being with herself she is so free, but also beholden to making the life that she wants for herself and I see in the work and in our conversations the lives she didn’t choose are still with her. Nothing is in my way except me, and I know we share this ghost of urgency, this pulsing desire to see what happens next. I have a feeling that all the lives I didn’t live will show up with equal strength in my writing as what I have actual experienced in my life.

Joan meticulously unpacks another series of pastels, a vibrant array of objects observed in the home or acquired via grocery delivery while she spent five hours a day for 6 weeks in bed.

“Wow! These are so alive Joan! Would you consider this a comeback?”

She looks at me with a hotness that edges towards chastisement.

“Let’s keep it simple. I don’t need catchphrases to describe what’s happening. I’m living. I’m seeing.”

For a moment I am so ashamed of my words encroaching on Joan’s new observations, and this precious time of her life. Rendered so richly, I feel I have sullied this fresh art in some way. The stunning lack of subtlety that writing sometimes involves can really bulldoze things, and I am reminded I need to be constantly re-evaluating the price of this alchemy, the lasting considerations of my thoughts on the page, and vulnerable sharing in public forum.

The shame subsides as I get lost in the work being displayed on the kitchen table for me and the late afternoon sun, each reveal of what lives behind the wax paper more exciting than the last. Comeback isn’t the right word for what Joan has been up to or what I’m digging into either. Comebacks need an audience. What I am doing is just for me. What Joan is doing, is just for her.

The discovery, the ride of pride without ego is very much worth my time, without salary or platform, but with a commitment to discovery and sharing that discovery. Time I see now as the number one tool of my trade, the best way to allow my thoughts the fullness they deserve while still acknowledging that each singular thought will change as it connects with others, as my learning on myself and the world deepens. “The ability to use tools lets us leave a permanent trace of our actions and thoughts for others to see”, Dissanyake shares.

I’m going to make this time special, incomparable perhaps, and what I collect will be shared, but it will not be performed. Instead lived with joy and a mind to make something of it including an opportunity to learn, and to share how with the company of others I can always be learning more luminantly.