Wrapping up Month One: Art History

One of my personal favs – L'Escarpolette, aka “The Swing” (c. 1767) by Rococo painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard

(TL;DR – there’s a little bullet point summary/resource list at the end, if you feel like skipping ahead!)

Holy guacamole, March is almost over! I saw a poll on Instagram yesterday asking whether people felt like 2021 was going really fast or really slowly, and pretty much everyone that responded said it was flying by. Boy howdy, I couldn’t agree more. After 2020 crawled its awful ass along, 2021 –which is clearly 2020’s oddball cousin – is speeding onward. And with it, my 2021 Arts Odyssey moves from Month One: Studying Art History into Month Two: Listen to Classical Music! So let’s have a little looksee back at March and how my nerdy art history project went.

Well, it was an interesting month. As I explained in my opening post this month, I chose to study art history for my first of ten projects because I thought it would be easiest. After all, I’ve basically spent the last decade of my life as a researcher of different types. Since abandoning my life as an opera singer almost ten years ago, I’ve done my law degree and MBA, worked in a firm, worked at a big corporation, and freelanced as a writer and communication consultant. I have spent, and still spend, an ever-loving shit-ton of time reading and researching. Surely it would be comfy and easy to just switch over to reading and researching artsy stuff again, right?

Sorta yes, sorta no. Being a life-long super nerd, the mechanics of studying come natural to me. I’m a fast reader and learner, I’m very good at organizing and synthesizing material and information, and I ease into a flow state every time I crack a textbook, uncap a highlighter, and dig in. It’s my jam. What I hadn’t anticipated was the weight of the feelings I would encounter in this very first little tiptoe back into my artsy past.

Over the years since I left performing and making and acting and living within the realm of all things artistic, I’ve come to realize that the arts exist in that magical plane between human existence and the divine. The reason people are suddenly moved to tears by a piece of classical music isn’t necessarily because they “get it” – it’s because there is something in that piece, left behind by the composer and translated by the performers, about the nature of being. There is some ember of knowing tucked away in the greatest plays, the greatest operas, and yes, the greatest paintings, and when we listen or gaze or allow our minds to wander within them, we feel that eternal warmth. We touch the divine.

It sounds airy-fairy until you’ve had that experience, but it is so real. So it really should not have come as a surprise that spending a month looking at the world’s most celebrated art might swirl up some feelings for me. Good feelings. Fascinating feelings.

More tangibly, this month made me feel really grounded. Having an ongoing project to work on every day (aside from the bits and bobs of freelance work I’m doing) feels amazing. After a year (a year!) of being in near-quarantine with my bubble of my husband Ryan, our dog, and our baby (born just as the pandemic began – oooof), it feels absolutely incredible to feel like each day is a little bit different, and, more than that, to feel like I’m making forward progress. I heard on a podcast the other day that the most frustrating feeling to human beings is stagnancy, which is one of many reasons why the pandemic has been so challenging for everyone’s mental health. As a doer who likes to have full days and lots of things to work on, I couldn’t agree more.

So I would call Month One of this little journey an epic success, even though I often felt like I wasn’t making enough progress, or wasn’t going fast enough, or wasn’t doing enough each day. I steal a little time here and there to squish this in, but every minute seems to be paying dividends. I made a kick-ass timeline of the major periods and artists of the Western Canon (aka, Euro-centric arts and artists that we think of as “famous”). I read about deconstructing and decolonizing these traditions, and questioning the very idea of looking at art as a study of time, rather than of geography or ideology or religion or political forces. I started following all kinds of interesting scholars and contemporary artists on social media, devoured YouTube videos, and discovered my new favourite podcast. All in all, an absolutely wonderful month.

Here’s a little summary of Month One: Study Art History! I’m so excited for Month Two and all the classical music it will bring. I plan to do a little guided listening each day of some of the greatest pieces in the canon, so if you’re classical music curious, follow along! To the next stage in the journey!

SUMMARY OF MONTH ONE: STUDY ART HISTORY

Project details

Make a bullet journal timeline of western art history, using E. M. Gombrich’s The Story of Art as the guiding text. Watch YouTube videos and read articles online for additional context on specific movements and artists.

Favourites

YouTube channels:

• The Art Assignment - My favourite art history account, no question. The videos are short and snappy, super engaging, and wonderfully curated. 10/10.

• The National Gallery - I really enjoyed the talks given by museum staff about specific works, much like you would experience on a guided tour.

• Great Art Explained - Longer form videos (their thing is “explained in 15 minutes”), mostly on art history movements, famous works, and major artists. Good stuff.

Podcasts:

• Art Juice - AKA, my new favourite podcast, even though it’s not about art history. Two painters in the UK discuss all things related to being a professional artist. It’s so down-to-earth, refreshing, and inspiring. As a Canadian, it’s also deeply relaxing to listen to – like the art version of Great British Bake Off.

• Art Sistory - On the other end of the podcast spectrum is Art Sistory, which features two sisters tackling major artists and movements with… how do I put this… irreverence? If you’re more into, say Drag Race, this might be your cup of tea.

• Some wonderful episodes from Revisionist History, Season 5 – I especially LOVE the first episode about countless masterpieces stored in museum vaults around the world.

• This beautiful episode of the New York Times podcast The Daily – An ode to Michelangelo’s David that I found moving and enthralling, especially having seen the statue in person a couple of times.

Email:

• The Jealous Curator’s email subscription - Again, not about art history, but I found it this month and I just have to gush about how great it is. Jealous Curator is OG art blogging, and she just moved her daily blog about current artists over to a subscription email format. It’s absolutely delightful – I honestly look forward to it every day.

TV Show

• Fake or Fortune (originally BBC, now available on various platforms – I watched on Netflix Canada!) - If you liked Antiques Roadshow back in the day, or if you love a good mystery, this is the art show for you. Is the painting worth a bundle, or is it a forgery? A team of experts not only figure it out, but tell you all about the artist and time period in the process. I love it.

What Inspired Me This Month

“La Notte” AKA, “The Holy Night”, by Antonio da Correggio, c. 1530.

This new mama got reeeeal obsessed with this painting this month, and I think you can see why.

A Picasso linocut (a type of printmaking) that coincidentally lives in my hometown, Saskatoon, SK at the Remai Modern.

• OBVIOUSLY the thing that inspired me the most this month was the art itself. Biggest joys:

  • Expanding my obsession with the Italian Renaissance masters (I’m a Michelangelo fangirl). Falling in love with Titian and Correggio.

  • Confirming that I still can’t stand anything from the Mannerist movement. Blech.

  • Obsessing over portraits with tons of character, especially from around the 17th century (like those by Rubens, van Dyck, Hals, and my fav: Velázquez).

  • Kandinsky (colour!), Hockney (more colour!), and the entire photorealist movement (especially with lots of colour!).

  • LIVING ARTISTS! Nneka Jones, Beverly Fishman, Kehinde Wiley, Kara Walker, Kent Monkman. The landscape of the arts does not look as white or as male as it used to (or, as art history has canonized it to look like.)

• This article about decolonizing art history

• The history of printmaking (which I’ll be revisiting in my July project! I’M ALREADY SO EXCITED)

One Sentence Takeaway

Let your nerd flag fly.

Month One Begins! Studying Art History

My year-long challenge (okay, 10-month-long, because it’s already March) is officially underway! In case you missed it, I’m spending 2021 on a voyage back to my artistic self. Having turned away from everything artsy that I consider foundational to who I am at my core, I am positively thrilled to be turning the hard lessons of 2020 into some positive action in 2021.

The project I chose to start with was intended to be an easy, comfortable way to get this endeavour underway. I thought I picked something that would be casual, light, and familiar – something that I enjoy, but that I don’t have a lot of baggage around. Well, it already turns out I was a little bit wrong, and on a journey to shake things up in my life and (hopefully!) find my way back to my truest self, I think being wrong might be good.

So, first the logistics, then some early lessons. The first project in my 10-month Arts Odyssey (as I’ve chosen to call this little wandering) is to Study Art History. I love visual art, I’ve always loved art history, but I’ve never had any formal education in it. Despite knowing lots of bits and pieces about the great artists of the Western world, I don’t really know a lot about the arcs and movements of art history (except where it overlaps most neatly with music history, which I studied extensively in my schooling to become an opera singer). Add to this curiosity the fact that I (pardon my French, but also – get used to it, I tend to curse a lot) fucking love studying. I love learning new things. I LOVE organizing information. I absolutely adore the feeling of being a little bit lost in a vast amount of material and figuring out how to move that information around, synthesize it, make connections, and emerge with my arms around what I’m trying to learn. Oh holy shit do I love it. 

Which is pretty much why I went to law school in the first place. You see, in music school (especially opera programs), you take music history and theory and analysis and all those really wonderfully nerdy classes, but (by and large) you’re expected to put most of your focus on rehearsing and performing. By the time I was in my master’s of music program to try to become a professional opera singer, very little of my time was devoted to studying, and the courses I found myself in were… how should I say this… not exactly rigorous. When I hung up my ballgowns and decided to go back to school a couple years later, law school sounded incredibly appealing. Super nerd me wanted to be free to highlight, tab, and study to her heart’s content. 

2020: “Here are some life lessons!”

2021: “What are you gonna do about it?”

Which brings me to some early takeaways I’m already seeing about myself as I pour over art history textbooks. This tension between my performer side and my academic side, I am coming to realize, has been within me for many, many years, and I’ve never really figured out how to merge the two. In fact, in a wonderful act of foreshadowing at my kindergarten assembly, I told the school that I wanted to be a “singing palaeontologist” when I grew up. When I was in middle school, I couldn’t choose which career I wanted more, so I told people I was going to be a political speech writer (because: The West Wing), but maybe also host “Weekend Update” on Saturday Night Live. This duality followed me through high school, where I identified closely with two identities: the performer girl, who starred in the musicals and played in all the bands and sang at assemblies and won debate competitions and gave speeches and all that shiny stuff; and, super academic girl who was the top of every class and won all the subject awards at graduation and made her own laminated, themed dividers for her binders every year (ironically, they were printouts of famous paintings with corresponding quotations from literature that I collaged… man I was cool.)

This duality in my personality and interests ran parallel pretty comfortably until it was time to commit to a course of study for university. High-achieving, people-pleaser that I am, I quietly wrote the SATs (I’m from a small Canadian city – there were only four of us writing them that year), applied to Harvard to study English literature, and got in. I hadn’t told any of my friends that I was applying.

In fact, most people in my life then or now don’t know that any of this happened, because – spoiler alert – I didn’t go.

I applied because it seemed like the logical thing to do. I was the best, so I would go study at the best. I wanted my parents and my grandparents and all of my teachers to keep seeing me as the best, so I needed to keep one-upping myself. I remember getting 105% on a paper in Grade 9, and that pretty much ruined me – there was no limit to how well I could do, so I would keep chasing “better”. If I didn’t, surely I would be letting everyone down.

So I got into Harvard. I remember feeling pride when the letter came, but also like the weight I carried around all day on my shoulders had turned into an enormous boulder, threatening to crush me at any moment. What would happen when I got there? Could I still be the best? I had gotten some funding, but it would still be enormously expensive to my parents, who had offered to pay the rest. How could I possibly do well enough to pay off that emotional debt to them? How would I ever justify their investment?

Rather than process any of these emotions, I became fixated on one aspect of Harvard that I knew I was excited about: the choir. Like all Ivy League schools, Harvard has a wonderful tradition of choral music, and being a choir nerd myself, I was sure I could get into the top-tier choir, and surely it would be wonderful. It’s the only aspect of Harvard I thought about. I would sing in the choir.

Then, one day, I was at a singing lesson, and my teacher said something along the lines of “if you had wanted to, you could have made it as a singer instead.” She may not have even been this explicit. She may have said “you could have been good enough to be a professional” or “maybe you might have enjoyed being a music major, instead” or “hey, could you hand me a pencil?” – whatever it was, I latched onto it like a life raft. I withdrew my conditional acceptance to Harvard and never sent my final Grade 12 transcript to finish my admissions process. I auditioned to my local university’s small music department, stayed in my childhood bedroom, and went on with my life in my hometown. As I watched the sparkle of pride dim in each family member’s eyes, then each teacher’s eyes, as I explained my decision, I felt like I learned what it means to let people down. I felt like my fears had been confirmed: I was my accomplishments.

“I felt like my fears had been confirmed: I was my accomplishments.”

Fast forward to when I decided to stop singing, and went back to school to do my law degree and MBA. I was so starved for academics. I longed to learn, to study, to delve in, to expand my brain, to debate, to feel challenged. And I also longed to stop performing. I was tired of being on display, and of being picked apart constantly. I wanted to take my makeup off and sit in a corner of a library by myself. Since there was no big moment of decision, my singing teachers and coaches and friends all just faded away as I stopped taking lessons, taking auditions, and performing anywhere. Then, as I told the non-singing people in my life that I was going to be an entertainment lawyer or an agent or an arts executive, I saw that spark of pride come back that I put out years ago. I was understood again. I was admired.

Until, of course, I quit my fancy, high-profile job to write and make things instead. This whiplash of what I perceived to be acceptance and even love when I achieved traditional academic or professional milestones, versus confusion or insecurity when I chose the arts and creativity, has been such a powerful pattern in my life, yet I am only seeing it clearly right now as I look down at my highlighted, dog-eared, sticky-tabbed version of E.H. Gombrich’s landmark tome The Story of Art. As I begin this project of studying art history, reading texts and making notes and drawing timelines and deciphering works I thought I knew, I am feeling that half of my heart light up that did when I was in law school, learning new things and making connections. But I also feel that other half warmly glow as well – the part that felt like I was touching heaven when I sang with an orchestra, the part that would swell like it would burst as I practiced a particularly beautiful melody, that part that recognizes a piece of music as so special that some part of it must belong to my soul and not just to the universe at large.

I think this merging of the two tracks I’ve found myself on to date might be the big reason for my Odyssey this year, but of course it’s too early to call it. After the profound separateness I felt in 2020 – a separateness from that glowing nugget we call “who I am” that I know so many of us felt in different ways – it feels amazing, even miraculous, to feel this integration occurring. It makes me so excited for the month and year to continue.

On that heavy note, I will delve back into my current study of late eighteenth century English art. Next post, I’ll give some tips on resources and techniques for study that I’m employing and enjoying. Until then: happy studying, if you’re studying along!  

Integration, ho!

The 2021 Arts Odyssey Begins

2020 sucked for pretty much everyone, and I would certainly put myself in this group. 2020 was the year I had a baby just as the pandemic began, started working again two months after she was born, then hit the hormonal-imbalance postpartum wall. Now, two months into 2021, I’m feeling much, much better… but this experience has been deeply illuminating.

2020 revealed many truths. For me, it revealed how far I had drifted from myself. In 2021, I’m going to do something about that.

You see, until I was almost 30, I trained to be a professional opera singer – it was my passion, my obsession, my whole life. Then, just as I was becoming a real professional, I quit. I went back to school and did my law degree and my MBA. Why? Well, mostly because I wanted the people in my life to understand and respect what I did for a living. Spoiler alert: that was not a great reason.

I really did enjoy law school and my MBA, and I got a dope corporate job out of all of it. But, I hit burnout twice in three years, became very unhealthy, and was so stressed that I felt completely out of control of my own life – so I quit. I blew up my life again, gave up my super secure job, packed up my chic open-concept cubicle, and became a freelance copywriter. I finally got pregnant with my daughter (the one I gave birth to just as the pandemic began). Turns out this was not an ideal time to have a baby (what a surprise!). My burnout tendencies, old hormonal imbalances, and pressures I always put on myself all closed in on me, and I became an anxious, depressed, panicking postpartum mess.

But, with the help of therapy, my amazing husband, and the passage of time resetting my hormone levels, I am beginning to thrive again. And, with the turning of the year over to 2021, I can feel a return to myself manifesting. I don’t regret becoming a lawyer or working in my corporate job – both were amazing in their own ways. What I do regret is turning away from art completely during these years. I used to be an incredibly artsy kid, then a professionally artsy adult. Yet here I am, in 2021, not doing a single artistic thing that used to be the foundation of who I am at my core. Surely this might be linked to how out of balance I’ve felt for years. Perhaps I laid down too many parts of myself on the road to “adulting.”

So that brings me to now. As my postpartum challenges have mostly resolved themselves, and as the pandemic rolls on, I have decided to investigate those artistic pursuits I used to hold so dear, and see if I can find the pieces of myself I might have dropped somewhere along the way. I decided to chronicle this journey here and on social media, even though it feels super cringy at the moment. I’m a pretty polished, put-together over-achiever, so even typing the word “postpartum” had me ready to throw my computer out my bedroom window. But. I don’t know about anyone reading this, but for me, part of what has been so hard about the pandemic – and about new mom life – is feeling so isolated. So I’m going to do this out loud, just in case someone wants to connect over it.

Plus, whenever I tell people in my "new life” that I used to be an opera singer, they inevitably tell me about how they used to dance as a child, or play in a band in college, or how they love to draw but “they’re so terrible they would never show anyone their drawings.” I always sense a real sadness in these conversations, which makes me think there might be a lot of people who set down the artistic parts of themselves at some point. The pandemic has been such a strange opportunity (is that the right word?) to confront ourselves, that maybe – just maybe – someone might want to pick up those pieces of themselves like I’m going to try to do. Maybe we can do that together.

So here’s the deal: I picked 10 projects to tackle over the next 10 months (it’s the beginning of March, so I’ll be doing a project per month until the end of 2021). Like I said, I’ll be chronicling each project here, in a newsletter, and on social media (even though that absolutely terrifies and intimidates me). I decided to call this my Arts Odyssey, because an odyssey is a kind of spiritual wandering, where we can learn lessons along the way, even if we can’t predict what they will be when we set out. That sounds about right at the moment. An odyssey also feels long and daunting, which is pretty much how I’m feeling at the moment as well.

But I also feel thrilled. Back in my power. Stepping into myself. Just planning out the ten months and getting set up has been the happiest thing I’ve done just for myself in months and months. I feel free. I feel invigorated. I feel excited. Those are not words I have been using much during the ol’ pandemic. So if any of that intrigues you, I encourage you to join me. You can do the same projects I’m doing, or you can make your own Arts Odyssey (or hell – any kind of odyssey you want. It’s your odyssey, who am I to tell you what to do). If you want to work along with me, here’s my calendar. I hope you’re as excited as I am, and I hope it’s as fruitful as I suspect it might turn out to be. Here’s to 2021 not sucking!

THE 2021 ARTS ODYSSEY

AUGUST: Practice a musical instrument

MARCH: Study art history

SEPTEMBER: Be obsessed with dance

APRIL: Listen to classical music

OCTOBER: Be a theatre nerd

MAY: Sing along with musical theatre

NOVEMBER: Cry over opera

JUNE: Understand the world of jazz

DECEMBER: Sing together, at last

JULY: Make art