ART, A Good Prescription for Sanity: Fighting Off the Doldrums
Archive: From April 17th, 2o21
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s last book that she was totally involved in before she passed away was These Happy Golden Years, and it is my absolute favorite of the Little House books, which I think are a product of their time and place and are getting a bad rap right now in my opinion and this is from someone who has taught Native American kids for a decade and a half- but that is another blog post. (I’ll put a link HERE when I post that).
But do you remember when Laura was teaching out on the blizzard prone plains of South Dakota and couldn’t go home everyday even though it was only 12 miles and had to room with the Brewster family and was sleeping behind the curtain when Mrs. Brewster threatened her husband with the kitchen knife?
Well, there is a term for that. It was described by Eugene Virgil Smalley in 1893….
PRAIRIE MADNESS: "an alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new Prairie States among farmers and their wives,
caused by the isolation and tough living conditions on the Prairie”
I’m pretty sure I have that, and you probably do too. We can at least relate, somewhat, how isolation and tough living conditions caused by a worldwide pandemic can cause “the collective crazy” ( my word by the way).
How does life go on, the day to day stuff, when you are waiting for the winter to pass, times to get better and for life to get back to whatever it gets back to? I was always amazed at my grandmother’s matter of fact-ness about the Great Depression and World War 2- as mother of young children, raising and growing most of what they needed on the farm. I wonder what she would say about where we are now. I don’t think she would have much to say, actually, just would shrug her shoulders and go about her day. Check out photos and her story in my second installment of Art: A Good Prescription for Sanity
And as I have stated before in the whole scoop of history, there have been many times like this before, it is just that our memories are so darn short. Up until recently catastrophes came often, were expected and more easily accepted. ( Clarifying that to the developed world who are spending our days whining about lack of travel, going to Disney World, wearing masks and not being able to go out to eat) . We all would be more reasonable and accepting if a mere 12 miles, the distance Laura had to commute to go home every night, kept us where we were. If you want to read how the Ingalls and the Wilder family dealt with outbreaks of malaria and diphtheria, the latter resulting in Almanzo Wilder being crippled for the rest of his life, go HERE ( Epidemics in Children’s Literature)
And for a sobering reminder of what life was really like not that long ago, read, or listen to Prairie Fires…
that traces the historical events shaping the Midwestern states at the time the Ingalls and many others were settling them, and the impact and destruction the Great Migration had on the people already living there. But, now or then, Prairie Madness or Covid Collective Crazy, quarantines, self-isolation, lock-downs, shutdowns, limited hours of operation, supply chain slow-downs, recalls and stuck ships on the Suez Canal can produce some depressing time. There is a name for that too…
DOLDRUM
/ˈdōldrəmz,ˈdäldrəmz/
noun
a state or period of inactivity, stagnation, or depression.
The term Doldrums got its name from an event that happens on the waters around the Equator where the winds are known to stop blowing at certain times of the year and, in doing so, trapping ships for weeks, although the ships waiting in the seas around the Suez Canal were trapped by bad navigation.
If you are wondering what those on board were doing with their time waiting for the sails to engage again, read Art, A Good Prescription for Sanity: Isolation of Sailors. Hint: They might be knitting or embroidering.
Ivan Aivazovsky, from wikiart.com
Before you are too impressed with my knowledge of the origins of such terms, let me confess I learned it from watching…
Outlander, Season 3, Episode 9… available on the Starz Channel, Amazon.com
Disclaimer: I watch and read a lot of things that might surprise some people- let’s just say on my audible.com “listening” list and movie and TV history I have everything from “Bodice Rippers” to College lecture series on Western Civilization. I can also get lost in funny dog videos for hours, I’m an enigma, wrapped up in something!
Confession, Diane Gabaldon Outlander Series is just my kind of a “ boy meets girl” story where a World War 2 nurse…
is transported back to the Highland Jacobite uprisings in mid 1700’s Scotland and meets well, Jamie Fraser…
who, by the way, knows how to knit and darn socks, like any good burly Highlander.
I do recommend reading it with a filter, skipping some parts and frankly with headphones if small children were about. I find women’s fiction- which seems to fall into the two categories of Clean/ Dirty frustrating. How can murder be Cozy? And frankly whether someone in times of great crisis stop to do “it” in the bushes or sends up a poetic monologue to the heavens, it all seems unrealistic and “blaaaah!” Makes me mad. How about some realistic depictions, okay More realistic depictions in fiction. For a post on some Reading Recommendations- both Clean and Not So Clean, go over to my KBLewis Writer site… “Choices Made with Little Options”
I do think that Outlander, after the fourth book…
Drums of Autumn, lost its way. But what a great ending, the Scottish clans, who were forced from their homes for one reason or another, have a proper Gathering in the New World, on the hills that will be Fraser’s Ridge and Jamie, as the leader, torches a great fire and all the clans call out their family names. Sadly Gabaldon thought it would be fine to squeeze “the turnip dry” with more books and the Starz Channel didn’t even film that scene from the book, well they kinda did, but used it as a way to push the story line forward, not as a resolution. Like a lot of series, I just stopped reading or watching and then pretend like there was no more after that!
Another series I’ve been thinking about in these times is…
TURN (AMC) is about the spy ring created during the Revolutionary War, but it also focus much on everyday life, picking cabbages to make a living and other daily chores needed to survive in Occupied America, people getting on with life, during a “unprecedented time” of war …
But back to this modern collective “doldrums”, which is now past its one-year anniversary. I have been trying to write this post for almost as long, coming back again and again, through the Summer, into the Fall and the Winter, apparently stuck in my own personal “doldrums” of unfavorable winds and unfortunately from more than just a worldwide pandemic.
Three months after I wrote the second installment of this series, life changed for us when we no longer could provide for an elderly parent to live somewhat independently. The result is there is a new normal for us to get use to and an old farmhouse on our homestead that use to house Grandparents for most of our children’s lives is now vacant and in desperate need of renovation. Would I suggest to anyone to take on a complete renovation during a pandemic, during a building boom complete with shortage of supplies and lumber? Or settle a parent into an assisted living home at the same time? No. Did we have a choice? No.
So now whole days can be given up to hauling bathtubs, shower inserts or hot water heaters back over the mountain from “town”. I’m learning how to tie down very big boxes, by myself in the back of a truck in the middle of the Home Depot parking lot. Every day includes checks on the slow progress of construction, yesterday was devoted to engineered septic tanks. Too often my stitching waits, my writing waits. The question “why bother” has entered my mind more than once this last year. My art studio looks like a large junk drawer. I have so much on the back burner of ideas to write-blog post I want to post, on literally three platforms, a fantasy series, a historical novel series, actually a few. Where do I start?
In 2019, I had such momentum in selling my originals and prints at the farmer and holiday markets, I was set to move into the more lucrative nearby Telluride market in 2020 and then be ready for some of Colorado’s summer art festivals in 2021. That all did not happen.
But this has happened before. Many years ago, one of my fabric collages won a National Children’s Magazine Illustration award for that year…I got the phone call three days after the same elderly parent had a heart attack, fell off a horse up on a mountain ridge and had to be flight for life-ed out. That time, to come home, some modifications to live independently had to be made. I can remember the call about the award like it was yesterday, it was actually over seven years ago. So overwhelmed with what had to be done, I thanked the lady giving me the good news and hanging up the phone when back to the task at hand.
At that time, like at this time, I had no time or mental energy to even think about what I could do with such recognition- how to promote, to send news of my award out to art directors or to tout it on social media. There was little space in me for art. Like most women across the world, we are the ones that stop and take care of what needs to be taken care of. There are many articles right now declaring how it is women… as the caretaker of children or other family members who often are the once whose “momentum” has to stop. (NPR article HERE).
And now?
At the start of the pandemic, accepting where the world was and that I would not being selling my original art out of my new spiffy, yet to be opened white art tent, I had delusions of at least being secluded in my studio, creating art like an “artist residency staycation”. I even invested in advertising, stuck at home I could do some freelance illustration again, that was all online, it was a perfect plan to ride out the year.
Yup, made my first payment to be in an illustration source book, what art directors use to find illustrators, I had won awards doing that a few years ago, I could do it again, right? Oh! If we all had a crystal ball to gaze into and know the future!
Now I sit here and write in the middle of April 2021, almost a year later. A new President in the White House. Everyone is eligible for the vaccine, if they want them. Most of my family has had their vaccinations. I’ve had mine thanks to living on the edge of an Indian Reservation where the Health Services has the resources to offer mass vaccination clinics. This spring, literal doors are opening and families can go into hospital and facilities to see their elderly loved one, though here in the Southwest we still have to make an appointment. Are favorable winds beginning to blow? The farmhouse is at a place I’m looking at cabinets, tile and light fixtures. Are the winds shifting?
But what of my art and my writing? When will the favorable winds bring the muse, the inspiration? When do I jump back into the markets, either here or virtually. When and where do I want to go? How do I find my way back, get that momentum going again.
I Do Know, after being a professional artist for over thirty years, how to coax the winds, how to find the inspiration. And the answer has always been to go back to the basics. Just draw, write, just create, just make art, to go back and find that time when inspiration flowed, to go back to the source. Not outlining a grand story idea, just a thought, maybe a blog post. Not art to fill the market I want to get back to. Not art for the season that is coming or the holiday. Not art to get interest on Social Media, just art. A drawing, a sketch with no thought of perfection, not art to frame, no masterpieces, just sketching on cheap paper with pens and markers…
Had one of those moments in Utah a few weeks ago. We were T@B camping, visiting Zion. Escaping…
JL had business meetings on Zoom in the morning, so I went exploring. Took my sketch bag down to the old part of St. George, found a perfect parking spot in front of Brigham Young’s Winter house, where the apricot trees were starting to bloom. To look, to see, to study, to observe for no other reason than to be taken in by the curve of a branch, the swell of a horizon. It’s hard to describe what sketching/ drawing does for an artist, but it is most certainly our “reset button”, our way to refocus, find our path. If such things were allowed right now, I’d join a figure drawing group, yes the ones where a model is nude, something artist have done since the Renaissance, though female artists haven’t been allowed to peer on the naked form until very recently, (possible ‘nother blog post.)
But I know observation -written or drawn actually, eye to subject, then hand to paper is the way through for me, through the doldrums of this pandemic, social unrest, shaken up world. And I know it is the art that will tell me the way to go. Art has always been my steady, my constant, this gift from God that saved me from a childhood of divorce and abandonment, from undiagnosed dyslexia and social cruelty because of it. In a childhood where I was often told I was doing something wrong, no one could tell me I was doing Art wrong, and that saved me.
Then Art kept me company in the time I raised my girls and in teaching other children, I was able to use Art to open up their eyes to a world that was a bit bigger than they knew. Something many deem unimportant work, but I knew I was giving a gift and if it stuck in them, a tool to deal with bumps along their own journeys. Because there will always be times we can not escape. There will always be times the winds are not blowing us on to favorable paths, there will always be times of waiting in the doldrums.
I always seem to forget the power Art has and don’t pick up my pen or my needle and lose my way. But eventually I remember to go back to my sketchbook, my bag of pens, cheap paper. Sketchbooks are supposed to be filled with discarded sketches, mistakes, unfinished work. In my opinion, blog post should be filled with less polished work, imperfect ponderings, musings…
From Google…
BLOG /bläɡ/ noun
“A regularly updated website or web page, typically one run by an individual or small group, that is written in an informal or conversational style.”
It is through the sketching, informal drawing or through blogging, which is just a virtual form of journaling, that the flow comes (Wikipedia article Here ) I call it “my groove”, tapping in to things bigger than ourselves but whatever the word used, the reality is inspiration can be very illusive.
I talked about this before, a long time ago, on this blog, when it was hosted on Blogspot.com and required tiny picture files, have I mentioned how much I love Squarespace. Back in 2013, after a full summer of travel, helping again elderly parents, I wrote “Feeding the Spirit” which basically says what I just “said/wrote”. Or Feed the Whales…
Being dyslexic, words and phrases can come out wrong. I never seem to be able to say “Fill the Well” and it usually comes out “Feed the Whales”. Which I intend to do now. I have plenty of unfinished work to stitch, an art studio to excavate, and I’m going back to the basic truths, the classic tenants of study, pondering, observation and cheap paper and words, I will be ready when the wind chooses to blow again.
Post Script: As I wrote that very profound ending to this installment of Art: A Good Prescription for Sanity , it occurred to me that throughout history there is a significant connection between artist, writer and well, Insanity…Huh? Another blog post, or do I even want to go there? Watch for the fourth installment of Art: A Good Prescription for Sanity to find out.
