Eleanor as Artist

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.

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.

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.

Devi, wire figure

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.

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.