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.

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.

Taking up painting after retirement

Yesterday I wrote about painters who continued working into their dotage. Today, I give you an example of one who didn’t even start until after most of her peers were dead.

Hoosick Falls, New York, In Winter, 1944, Grandma Moses

“The examples you gave yesterday are of people who have painted their whole lives,” a reader wrote. “I won’t have time to learn to paint until I retire. Do you think that is also true for people who take up painting at a later age?”

Leaving aside the idea that other work makes painting impossible (it doesn’t), we have a great example in Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses. She was born in 1860 in Greenwich, New York. She died in 1961 in Hoosick Falls, which is about twenty miles south. She had given birth to ten children, five of whom survived. She and her husband subsisted as small farmers, making much of what they had and doing without. From our 21^st century viewpoint, her life was hard and limited in scope.

Wash Day, 1945, Grandma Moses

Still, that band of land from Greenwich to Hoosick Falls is arguably New York’s most sublime landscape, a region of soft rolling hills, fertile fields and pretty, old farmhouses. The other place where she lived for two decades, Staunton, Virginia, is in the Shenandoah Valley. It could be described exactly the same way. Both are places where rich urbanites come to vacation and appreciate the beauties of nature, but where the locals struggle to keep the house painted.

Grandma Moses did not take up painting until she was 78, but she showed an inclination toward art for her whole life. She had rudimentary art lessons in the one-room schoolhouse she attended (now the Bennington Museum in Vermont), and access to art supplies from the family who hired her as a farm hand at the age of twelve.

Mt. Nebo On The Hill, crewel embroidery, 1940, Grandma Moses

She produced quilts, dolls, and much crewel embroidery. Her unique painting style resonates with the values of her needlework, which in turn was influenced by the Currier & Ives lithographs of her childhood. Long before she was a painter, she was embroidering landscape paintings of her own design. In fact, she only took up painting when arthritis made holding a needle too difficult.  

Moses was discovered by art collector Louis Caldor, who saw her work in the window of Thomas' Drug Store in Hoosick Falls. Three of the paintings he bought were then included in the Contemporary Unknown American Painters exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1939. Two one-woman New York shows immediately followed. This began Moses’s meteoric rise in the art world. By 1943, there was an overwhelming demand for her paintings. 

Photo is labelled on reverse: “Mrs. Thomas and Grandma Moses her paintings were displayed in Mrs. Thomas drug store Hoosick Falls, N.Y. that's how she was discovered A man came by bought all paintings at $1.00 each.” c. 1940 (Courtesy Hoosick Falls Past and Present Facebook page)

Her homespun viewpoint contrasted sharply with the abstract-expressionist Zeitgeist of post-war intellectual America. She was popular for all the same reasons her friend Norman Rockwell was popular. By the middle of the 20th century, there was a noticeable split between the cognoscenti and the middle classes in terms of values and mores. It has only become wider and deeper today.

Most of Grandma Moses's paintings were done on cardboard and are relatively small. She painted her scenes first, and then inserted figures going about the daily work of farm life. She didn’t draw from life or photographs, but from her own fertile imagination. Because of this, her paintings are reminiscent of the Labours of the Seasons from medieval Books of Hours.

Country Fair, 1950, Grandma Moses

She belongs in the pantheon of naïve painters because she was self-taught, but to say that she was in any way primitive is risible, considering what has followed in the art world.