My artistic / creative piece for worldmaking Ex. 1

Mary Mailler’s Object of Art and the Second Diagram.

 

My Artwork, the World and a Room with a View

Last summer, I came to visit family and vacation in Maine, and once I got here, I decided I couldn’t go back to Tulsa to live with my husband.  I sent our youngest son back to him so that he could continue in his school there where he receives special services for autistic children.  I remained here with my oldest son, Max, who is sixteen, and attending a private high-school for gifted students. 

One of the main reasons why I couldn’t go back was because of the physical landscape there vs. the landscape here.  As an artist, I felt completely depleted and creatively empty living and trying to work in Tulsa.  Having grown up here, with the landscapes of New England so engraved in the fabric of my artistic being, I could not, no matter how hard I tried, adjust to being in Tulsa.  The difference between the two places in every way shape and form can’t even be described.  Everything from politics, to religion, to the landscape is so different, you might as well go to another planet.  The decision I made to stay was not something my husband would put up with so we divorced, quickly.  We still support each other and no one’s angry at anyone else, so that helps, but  the  divorce has been very difficult for my family to accept.  They’re all looking for reasons to blame me or be angry with me, yet no one has any idea of why my husband and I split.  My entire family is judging me and it has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever been through to discover that the people I love don’t love me enough not to judge me.

My capacity to cope with the stresses of running and financially supporting a household, supporting two children who are living in opposite ends of the country, one with autism, and the other gifted, are good enough I guess.  Sometimes though, I get very depressed, mostly because I hate my day job.  The depression and the fear that I have of having messed everything up in my life, for no really good reason except I just wasn’t that happy, is always present to some degree.  But so is the ever present, ever pressing need to create.   It rules over everything in my life, it sometimes feels as though I have no will and no ability to steer, turn around or go home.

 I tried fighting it and for a long long time I believed there was something very wrong with me because I couldn’t fit in with what I thought and what people told me I was supposed to do.  Eventually I figure out though that If I continued to try to fight it, I’d live a lie and I have less capacity to live a lie than I do to live the truth.  For these reasons, I don’t let the way my siblings are treating me since my divorce, the way my father is blaming me, etc. get to me, because they just don’t understand how my brain is different than theirs.  Being born a creative is much like being born gay or straight, black or white.  It’s not something you choose for yourself, it chooses you.  If you don’t live your truth, you’re never happy in the lie, and my truth is not my sister’s truth, or my ex’s, or my dad’s truth, my husband’s or my kid’s. It’s mine! 

 

Anyway, the toll this has all taken on me does not literally figure into my painting, but it directs and constrains me in psychological and financial ways.  My piece for this assignment is a small oil painting of a line of lilac bushes that are just outside the windows of my porch studio.  I don’t have an outdoor easel yet because I haven’t had the money to buy one or the mental energy to go outside and to try painting in the abstract sort of way that I think I’d like to.    Just as the boundaries of my porch have limited my subject matter and style of painting, so did family life in Tulsa keep me constrained in my approach and methodologies towards my work .  That’s very sad to say, and I feel down sometimes about splitting up my family.  But then, I think, well plenty of men have said it in the past, so why not a woman?   So far, I have about ten oil paintings of a lilac bush in the backyard.  Creativity, oil painting, trying new things, it’s all expensive in more ways than one.  I’m trying to figure out if I’m ready to make a bigger investment.  I grow weary of lilac trees.  I painted the geranium across the street once.  Geraniums are my favorite.  That was exciting.

My networks are pretty small and getting smaller all the time.  My husband still supports me and we talk all the time.  He gives me a lot of advice on media and career management for my artwork and he helps me in a lot of other ways as well.  Other than that, I have the wait staff at Pat’s Pizza who just about knows me by name, by now.   My older son is ever engaged with me in an infinite struggle of intellectual challenge and debate over whether or not LSD was instrumental in enabling Charles Manson to control his pseudo family.  These discussions and debates drain me to the point that I sometimes think I might as well have stayed in Tulsa, but he helps a little by staying out of trouble and doing well enough in school.  I also have the network and support of my fellow artists up here, the Bangor Art Society, fellow etsy artists and entrepreneurs, and of course my classmates and teachers.  Actually, I guess that’s a pretty big network.  Funny how networks can seem so small when the emotional need is great.