Last time I wrote a business blog, I was running a small-to-medium sized renovation company that was imploding around me. I didn't know it at the time, but I was about to emerge from that cocoon, raw and blistered, to drive across the country and reboot my life.
8 years since sitting at a desk and writing about home renovation and spiraling into despair.
6 years living in a shuttle bus in and around Santa Fe, NM.
5 years studying creative writing for a BFA at one of the top art schools in the country (just my opinion). I graduated in May with a degree, but more importantly, with about five solid manuscripts and a framework for creative practice. That's the hard part about being an artist in a culture that trains us to seek causal satisfaction; art and writing do not make for good action/reward chains. So, to be an artist requires much more discipline than almost any other vocation.
You probably know all this, few people are as dumb as the media wants us to believe we are. Most of us have inner worlds where all this stuff is obvious to us. What you might not have felt is the act of resistance required to hold course in the face of the eroding currents of life that tell us we must be productive, and productive means earning rewards and supporting the family.
I never made a traditional family. I don't have children. What I have instead, is an 87-year-old mom with dementia. I never planned for this. Cliché: man plans; God laughs. I've come to Florida at the threshold of completing one goal and beginning others, to learn how to become a care-giver to my mom.
She has been a working artist her entire life. Mary Alice Baer graduated from the Museum School in Boston and became a children's book illustrator. She worked for Ginn and then Simon and Schuster. Then she went freelance. Her style is very expressive, comic. Her illustrations focus strongly on the affect of her subjects, who are shown at turns as physically comedic, affectionate, and pensive.
As her illustration work dried up in the late 1980's, she began to explore pastel painting. She did portraits, landscapes, and flower studies. She made a series of greeting cards for production and continued to make very personal comic panels that she would share with no one, except me. She's a complex lady. I'm seeing how, after 48 years as her son and 33 years spent apart, we still have a lot to learn about each other.
She had artistic discipline. Since the late 1980's art has not really paid her bills. She worked lots of odd jobs. Cleaning, driving, deliveries – work that was brutal on her body. Throughout all that, she kept painting, holding booths at art fairs, and for a time, raising me. My mother is an example of continuing on into the dark forest of artistic practice, without the light of reward. She has no regrets.
Moving forward, my goal is to form artistic discipline and structures and build this book design business through generosity and creativity. Those are my values. I want to see more of both in the world.
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