When Chauncey came home
yesterday from teaching a writing class at a local university, he announced
that he had been assigned two more classes for the Fall. “You can keep being an
artist,” he said to Eleanor.
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| Robert Goodnough painting |
Eleanor wondered what “being
an artist” meant. She knew that Chauncey meant Eleanor could continue to work
in the garage creating mobiles and cards for her online shop without having to
find salaried employment. But what did “being an artist” mean and when did
making art become so important to Eleanor?
As a young child, Eleanor was
surrounded by artistic people. Eleanor’s mother was a New York actress, singer,
student of French literature and devoted museum goer. Two large abstract
paintings by Robert Goodnough, which Eleanor’s mother claimed she purchased at a “basement sale” at
the Metropolitan Museum, hung in the living room in Eleanor’s childhood home.
Her mother’s best friend attended Bennington College and was a painter before
she started having children. A colorful abstract painting of hers hung above
the piano in her house on Key Biscayne where Eleanor’s mother and her friend,
both transplants from New England, met in the 1960s. Eleanor was drawn in by
the recognizable circular shapes.
But, Eleanor witnessed the
difficulty of being creative while living in a society that promoted conformity
and opted for the straight and narrow path of being a good student and
following all the rules. She could not resist an urge to perform on stage and
acted in plays throughout her years in school. She considered majoring in
theater in college but when she did not receive the accolades she thought she
deserved, she decided to stick with Spanish which was less competitive and felt
safer.
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| Shelves |
It wasn’t until she was in
her thirties that Eleanor found herself making collage cards for her family and
friends for their birthdays. She claimed an area in the garage which had a work
table and shelves already there and turned it into her “art space.” Eleanor
took several drawing classes and noticed that she felt calm whenever she was
engaged in making art. She committed to spending three hours on Saturday
mornings in the garage and an hour at night once or twice a week.
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| Devi, wire figure |
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| Sailboat |
Eleanor doesn’t remember the
first time she made a mobile or even which mobile was her first. She thinks it
may be a female figure she made out of wire or possibly a sailboat she made
from cardboard and other materials. She doesn’t know when she started using
spray paint and forms cut from paper and magazines as stencils to create
pictures which sometimes worked and sometimes not but that was the excitement
of the process. Eleanor kept on
making mobiles and collages because it made her happy.
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| Cutting and gluing |
When Eleanor decided to leave
her job as a clinical social worker, she didn’t know what she would do. She did
not have a plan. She didn’t see herself as an artist. If being an artist meant
waking up in the morning and feeling excited about going into the garage to
glue beads onto cardboard or draw finches at the bird feeder as part of
research and development, then Eleanor thought that the next time someone asked
her what she did, she might be able to say she is an artist. Maybe.
