The Five‑Trick Pony Rides Down Memory Lane

Some stories don’t begin with inspiration; they begin with an itch. A tug. A little internal nudge that says, Hey, remember who you used to be? Today Jean follows that tug back to her art‑soaked past—marble dust, William Blake, big dreams, and the long undertow that pulled them out to sea. Along the way she picks up a few modern irritations, a MAGA fruit fly, and a reminder that kindness is sometimes a very slow weapon. It’s a walk down Memory Lane with a few sharp turns, a little humor, and the unmistakable voice of someone who’s lived enough life to tell it straight….AI

Some ponies are one‑trick ponies. Some are two‑trick ponies. If the topics I write about were a pony, I’d be a five‑trick pony. My subjects range from fellow residents in my independent living facility, my Mahjong obsession, my health‑care woes, politics, and—probably too often—I wander down Memory Lane.

Today I feel like wandering back to the days when I was obsessed with art, both making it and studying it. But like many people, dreams of greatness give way to life’s everyday struggles: making a living, building a life with a significant other, supporting parents as they need more and more help, and grieving when one of them dies. The heydays of my self‑indulgent art period drifted far out to sea, pulled down by an undertow so strong even Jacques Cousteau couldn’t have rescued it.

Etching print pulled from a metal plate

The print and poem above were created in the ’80s, shortly after my mom died suddenly, done in a printmaking class during my William Blake phase. For those who might not know Blake (1757–1827), Wikipedia describes him as “an English poet, painter, and printmaker…now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.” He was obviously a prolific saver of his work, because you can’t study printmaking or poetry without tripping over him. At least you couldn’t during my era of being a sponge in the world of art history. I admired him. I wanted to be him…or Michelangelo…or John Singer Sargent.

Etching done by William Blake

During my Michelangelo period, I actually tried marble carving in a sculpture class and I got an A for my efforts. If I had a photo of that unfinished sculpture of a woman’s breasts, I’d post it—but I don’t. I was in my twenties and I quickly learned I wasn’t physically equipped to haul slabs of marble around. I hadn’t met Don yet, and maybe that was a good thing. He was fascinated by my untested talents and would have gladly aided and abetted me continuing to carve marble. For a farm boy with no formal art training, he had a good eye, and in our early years together we went to a lot of art shows and galleries. But life has a way of changing, and we had to grow up and do adulting like everyone else.

If I could dig deep into my past and pull up one dream I still wish had happened, I’d choose to be John Singer Sargent. (That's a painting of his at the top.) But I never had the raw talent for that, nor do I have time left to develop the craftsmanship it would take to achieve even a tenth of his greatness. So I content myself with the occasional art class our Life Enrichment Director puts on our schedule. Last week she offered a video‑taught class on painting the Northern Lights, and it was very Mickey Mouse. Not even Disney‑quality Mickey Mouse — more like the knockoff version you’d find on a bootleg T‑shirt at a flea market. But I sign up for every art class she offers, just to support having an arts‑and‑crafts element on campus. The first painting below was done in my prime; the last one—of the Northern Lights—was done last week in whatever you’d call the opposite of my prime. My sub‑prime? 

One of my dogs sat for a formal portrait

 

The Northern Lights

A fellow resident bugs the heck out of me to start teaching a painting class here, and whenever our LED has a class, she always sits next to me. “So I can copy what you’re doing,” she says. Every time she brings up the idea of me teaching, I’m not wishy‑washy in saying no way will that ever happen. I don’t have the desire or the time to plan lessons on long‑forgotten techniques. But she is relentless. She tells people I’m shy (news to me) and she says, “I'm blowing Jean's horn because she's too shy to blow it herself.” She’s as annoying as fruit flies on a bunch of bananas. And she’s a die‑hard MAGA and Trump supporter to boot. She knows I’m part of the Liberal Ladies group here, and when Trump was reelected she said, “You just wait, you’re going to be really happy with how he’s going to turn this country around.”

Those words burn in my thoughts every so often when I’m sitting near her at our Monday Night farmhouse dinner table, biting my tongue at something she says. One of these days I’m going to buy a shirt I’ve had my eye on that says: “Killing them with kindness is taking longer than I expected.” If I wore that, I’d love to see how long it takes her to realize I’m not as nice as she thinks I am—that I’m a phony. That I don’t want to be her friend. That I’m not shy; I just don’t like her enough to teach her what I learned in over thirty years of being art‑obsessed. That if she wants a pedestrian teacher, she can hire Bob Ross’s ghost.

 Sometimes I get tired of holding back my words in the name of keeping peace in the community. I imagine most of us do it, no matter which side of the whatever fence we’re on, because we value a peaceful, harmonious environment. I worry, though, that someday the filter in my brain—the one they say gives out in elderly people—will fail and I’ll start saying whatever I’m thinking. Please take me out behind the barn and shoot me if it does. I’ve gotten along 84 years without purposely offending anyone, and I don’t want to wreck that record now. 

Boy, did I take a detour on my walk down Memory Lane. But I guess there’s only so much a person can say to explain away the lost dreams and hopes of our youth—and without that detour, I wouldn’t have written enough to call it a blog post. Besides at my age, detours are half the fun. You start out talking about one thing and end up with a tale worthy of a confession booth. But somehow it’s all connected—our youthful dreams, the people we tolerate who we wish came with a mute button, our fears for the future, and trying to hold on to the version of ourselves we show the world. ©

 

Post-script because I can't seem to let go of this topic: Below is a custom, paint-by-number I did last winter of my great-great niece. I plan to do two more this coming winter. As a kid I started with paint-by-numbers and I thought going back to them might help me re-learn to control the paints. When I found out you could send the company a photo to turn into a custom, paint-by-number I was sold. 

Living the Bohemian Life and Misbehaving Kids

It occurs to me that I do more thinking about life, than actually living my life. I plan. I plot. I dream of different scenarios of what my future could look like. That’s nothing new. I’ve been doing it as far back as I can remember. Even when I’m busy doing a boring or repetitious job I’ll be transported in my head to another place, another time and that sometimes gets me in trouble, especially when I’m driving on the expressway because it causes me to miss my off ramps. In the meantime, how much of real life is passing me by? Once in a while I’ll get on a kick where I feel I need the discipline and practice of living in the moment. You know the drill: if you’re slicing tomatoes you pay attention to the way the knife cuts through the red skin, the subtle smell that drifts up and how you do your next slices so they’re all even and beautifully fanned out on the cutting board. I can only do the living-in-the-moment exercise for so long---a week tops---before something in my brain calls up images of things like spending the summer on Nantucket, playing the role of a Bohemian artist and before you know it, all my tomato slices or clean socks are mismatched. 

Have you ever looked up the word “Bohemian?” I just had Alexa define it for me and she came up with six different meanings. Picking out the one I like the best, she said a Bohemian is, “A person, as an artist or writer, who lives and acts free of regard for conventional rules and practices.” I know what’s keeping me from spending the summer as a Bohemian artist on Nantucket---it would cost a bundle of money and I look gad-awful in floppy sunhats---but there is nothing but my own inhibitions keeping me from being a Michigan Bohemian. That and I truly am a conventional kind of person when it comes to following the rules of society. So what does being a Bohemian really mean to me? I ask myself for better clarification. 

And all I can come up with for an answer is a wish to be a really, really good artist that has people admiring the crap out of my work and telling me I’m the reincarnated John Singer Sargent minus the scandal of Madame X. My childhood dreams are still my childhood dreams. (It's all my mom's fault for letting me sleep with my first big box of Crayolas.) But have I lived the life where my art comes first above everything else? For over a decade, yes, I did but for the past 35 years art has come to rest at the bottom of the to-do list. You can’t (or a least I can't) achieve perfection at anything without a total devotion and the selfishness that's seems to be its Siamese twin. The most artistic thing I give my time to now is trying to write a shopping list I can actually read when I get to the grocery store.

I was thinking and writing about all this while having lunch at the Guy-land Cafeteria but I got distracted by my apparent low tolerance for children in a place that is normally filled with older people. Every single one of the five kids near me were annoying including the two who were well behaved and looked like they belonged on a Norman Rockwell Life Magazine cover. At another table another pair of whinny kids were making their mother look like a slug with no ears. The little girl---about four or five---had never been introduced to a comb or brush and I expected cooties to escape her head and come over to my table. Her older brother kept standing up in the booth to get a better view of the other diners. Across the aisle from me another mother was telling her son to put his shoes back on or she was going to pull his pants down and whoop him in front of everyone. He no more than got his shoes on when Stand-Up Boy kicked his shoes off and in the direction of the mom who threatens bare-butt spankings. Stand-Up Boy’s sister decided that was a good time to push her whining up to a higher decimal point and demanded that her French fries be cut in half. Who does that?

I had gotten a chocolate brownie to go with my grilled cheese sandwich which was a good thing because I needed all the comfort foods I could get, but I was wishing my mom had been there with me. Her kids or not, she would have gone into drill-sergeant mode and told Whinny Girl to straighten up or she’d give her something to whine about and she’d have told the shoeless boys she was taking their shoes away for a week. “Don’t want to wear shoes? Let’s see how you like walking on those hot sidewalks outside without them.” It’s at times like that when I know the Universe knew what it was doing when it didn’t give me the power to propagate babies. Back in the day, my mom might have been praised for her methods of controlling children but in today’s world I would have ended up in Social Services Prison where being a Bohemian in mind, body and/or spirit would not be tolerated. ©


Note: The Painting at the top is one of John Singer Sargent's. Madame X is at the bottom. It was originally painted with the one of the dress straps falling off her shoulder which shocked the art world and was labeled "titillating" and "indecent." Yes, slut shaming in 1884, at a time when the art salons were filled with classical paintings of nudes. Figure that one out. He repainted the strap after the painting's debut but her reputation never recovered. In 1916 when he sold the painting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Mr. Sargent renamed it to Madame X, not wanting to cause the socialite more grief by having her name forever associated with the work.