Maundy Thursday: Ruminations in a plague year

St. Thomas Church (Episcopal), Fifth Avneue, New York City

I haven't been to a Maundy Thursday service for a while. I considered finding one to go to this year; the virus put paid to that.

I might possibly have gone to one at St. John's in the Village, the Episcopal Church I belonged to when I lived in Baltimore. But I don't recall going to one. And I would recall. Because the drama of a well-done Maundy Thursday service can keep your soul going for a year, at least.

I do recall many Maundy Thursday services at St. Thomas, Fifth Avenue, NYC, in the years I lived in Manhattan.

Like the end of the rumble scene in the original Broadway production of West Side Story--which I saw when I was nine years old--the lighting of the St. Thomas Maundy Thursday service lingers in my mind, so close to the surface that I can summon it in a flash.

I can summon it in any season. I can summon it in any location. I can summon it when I am happy, when I'm scared, when I'm in limbo. Like now. The limbo of a modern day plague, not sending us to church to get closer to our god, but locking us into our homes to avoid a pestilence. I know the science is the modern way, and must be for now, but I wonder where the soul is. Still, that's not quite what this is about. Or maybe it is. You be the judge.

St. Thomas is an inordinately beautiful church, which, of course, enhances any experience of it. While I was a member, the rector was the Rev. John GB Andrew MBE DD, a man who demanded the best from everyone from altar guild ladies (I was one, reportedly the youngest he had ever invited to labor with that essential crew) to curates and right up to the members of the only residential Boy's Choir in the United States.

Father Andrew himself celebrated the Maundy Thursday evening service.  As usual at the highest of the high church rituals, there was the full Boy's Choir supported by the professional Men's Choir. There were additional celebrants; it took a lot of priests to accommodate the eucharist for what was, almost without fail, a packed church.  

Fr. Andrew died in 1996, after retiring for a second time from the church he served after St. Thomas. His death was  another one of those rents in the universe--or at least, in my life in the universe--that can never be rewoven.

A father like no other

Fr. Andrew and I had a stormy relationship, both of us strong-willed. He was more conservative than I, and did not--until he changed his mind--believe in ordaining women, and I did. But for reasons I will never understand, he consistently involved me in the life of the church, first with the altar guild, later as a delegate to an ecumenical meeting for NYC, and later still as a leader of a group especially for women, involving drinkies, dinner and a speaker. He supported me when I invited a financial analyst to speak during Lent, going so far as to send a "dear dummy" sort of letter to a visiting priest from Flyover Country who objected to that program. Fr. Andrew wrote to him, so nicely, that it was incumbent upon Anglicans to support themselves and family and friends, and, if possible charities--and that took money. So we all had to learn how to make and manage it for that purpose. So be quiet.

I left the church for a while. Don't ask why; I probably can't articulate it myself. But I often flee when things get too close, too cosy, too essential. Then a college student I had hired for the summer to help us renovate a house we had bought in the Hudson Highlands demanded to be taken to St. Thomas. Apparently, I never stopped talking about it. Probably because I never stopped missing it. (That feeling remains to this day.)

My husband had a trip to Oregon coming up and had to fly out of JFK at dark-thirty on a Sunday morning. "Oh, good," Margaret said. "So I'll go with you and we can have breakfast and then go to church at St. Thomas."

Drat. Foiled. Had to do it. Damn, wouldn't you know? John Andrew was the celebrant that day at the 11 a.m. service. And drat, didn't Margaret insist we had to go to coffee hour in the parish house? Sigh. In for a penny....

And so there we stood, mingling, with me introducing Margaret to the friends I'd left behind, sort of. (I still saw them, just not in church.) And then...yes, it was inevitable. Fr. Andrew came up behind me, put a hand on my shoulder. I turned around and he hugged me and said,  "I've been praying for this."

How could I fail to respond? I didn't fail. I returned to St. Thomas, my spiritual home then, now and always (although St. John's in the Village, Baltimore, is a close runner up.)

Is a low church as good as a high church?

I have been empty in Cornwall, bereft of a good high church in the land that invented the Anglican Church, the home of the Archbishop of Canterbury. I have searched. But they are afraid of incense, afraid of failing to attract Protestants while simultaneously failing those of us who love the beauty of the liturgy, music and elegance of the high church. I could go Anglo-Catholic...but that's not me, either. I am, top to bottom, a high-church Anglican.

This year, any church I might have gone to is empty, shuttered by a plague.

St. Thomas tackles the plague

This year my once and always church, blessed St. Thomas, Fifth Avenue, NYC,  is also empty. Only the celebrants and recorded organ music were there on Maundy Thursday, filming the service to post on the church website because of the virus. I suppose one could connect this with the plague years...but back then, people would have gone to church, thinking that doing so might prevent their getting the huge purple buboes that, most of the time, meant death. Once they had acquired the disease, they generally quarantined themselves. And mostly died. (The Black Death lasted in Europe, on and off, from 1346 to1353.)

Today New York City is quarantined, and is suffering from more deaths from coronavirus than they needed to because President Trump failed to act. Mayor Bill deBlasio and NY governor Cuomo have acted. But still, so harmful is the virus that St. Thomas Church, a beacon to Anglicans in the heart of Manhattan, is dark to preserve its congregation.

On Maundy Thursday 2020, arguably the most solemn day of the ligturgical year, St. Thomas was dark, except for pools of light on the celebrant. Ordinarily, the nave would be filled with light until the very end, allowing the congregation to read the Prayer Book and use the hymnal to sing the abundant hymns always included at St. Thomas, as many as the liturgy allows.

But even filmed--even minus a congregation whose rustling of hymnals is a substrate to any service--it is dramatic. There is the sudden plunge into darkness, followed immediately by the sounds of  the celebrant scrubbing the stone altar with water and palm leaves in the dark.

In an ordinary year, there is a moment...a long moment...during which the congregation, of one accord, remains very still. The lights come up gradually, just enough for people to see their way out. There is no voluntary, the organ music ordinarily played as the congregation exits.

The drama of the moment is missing from the video. It is not missing from my heart and soul. It is there, it has to be there. The human soul must surely be more than this virus, this locking away of the infirm, the rounding up of the rest, the hiatus in the education of children. The deaths of the healers. It MUST be more than that.

If this virus does nothing for us but convince us that human life is precious, but all the life around us that we are missing as we huddle indoors is just as precious, maybe it will have done its job.  Maybe we will be able to take the time--and pains--to worship, whether at a St. Thomas, a rural chapel, a woodland, a beach or wherever one finds the numinous.

Without the numinous, human life is tedious.  As tedious, to some of us, as being locked down to avoid a plague.

I think, after this is through, I shall have to find a successor to St. Thomas. If I find it, then leave it, then return...well, it's what I've always done. Possibly my search for the numinous is so intense that I simply step away for a while at times.

But 14 years is too damn long.

Copyright 2020, Laura Harrison McBride

Handria, Then and Now

Art Car--what a thing to do to a Porsche! (Wikipedia)

I can't honestly say I've ever had or ever wanted an art car. I've had bangers, that's for sure. And some really swell cars, like the huge silver Mercedes I leased to get me through the social/business barrier in Palm Beach County when I lived there. "You are what you drive" is the local motto. If you want to do good business, you'll shell out for a swell car.

So I did. Truth be told, I loved that car. But it was the 1980s, and repairs on it came in only three prices: $300, $500 and $700. The first was for windshield wiper blade replacements.

Anyway, years went by and I ended up in Baltimore. I was writing books and needed some information about the Irish Potato Famine, otherwise known--in my house anyway--as the British Genocide Exercise in Ireland. Online, I found a man named Conrad Bladey, owner of Hutman Productions, publisher of books and other fancy stuff.

If there is anything about the Genocide he doesn't know, it probably is hidden somewhere deep in the British annals of their perfidy at some swell university or other.

Anyway, Conrad and I got along famously during our phone discussions; he had kindly offered to let me pick his prodigious brain extensively for my book. After I finished the book, I invited him and his wife to dinner. I also invited my friend Noeleen, a bona fide Irishwoman from Swords, the place outside Dublin where Brian Boru is said to have died.

Excuse me, please, but I must do a bit of scene setting now. Noeleen has a wicked sense of humor; of course she does, she's Irish. We were once waiting for our table at the Baltimore Museum of Art's restaurant when a lady came in for drinks for a party on the terrace. It was a wedding shower, and all the attendees were wearing funny hats and had things attached to their clothing with clothes pins, or pegs as they say in the UK. The lady who came in for the drinks had a TON of clothespins on her. Noeleen said, "They must have hung her out to dry." Yeah. So you see....

Anyway, I guess I knew, when Conrad and I were nattering about the Famine, that Conrad also created art cars, but having never really seen one--as far as I could recall--it didn't scare me. 

It should have.

More scene-setting. I lived in a large apartment complex on the edge of an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. While most of the buildings fronted on Western Run, a small stream flowing through the north side of Baltimore, my building was the only one that fronted on a street of single-family homes, virtually all of them lived in by lovely, quiet, respectful Orthodox Jewish families with tons of kids.

It was a Friday night that we were having dinner with the Bladeys. Had I remembered what Friday meant in my neighborhood, I'd have planned it for ANY OTHER night. Not that the families walking by to shul--synagogue--for Friday services were a problem.

Conrad's CAR was the problem. 

Noeleen and I were looking out my huge front windows (damn, I LOVED that apartment) across my big front balcony (seated 8 for dinner comfortably) and remarked on the wonderful behavior of all the children going by, and how quiet they were.

And then the Bladeys arrived, in an art car called Handria. Why that name? Because it had plastic mannequin hands stuck all over it. And hanging out the rear driver's side window was not only a hand, but a whole forearm, poised there forever. Obviously, the car was only useful in the summer.


Attached to the forearm was an upper arm, a neck, a head and, descending, a pair of huge naked boobs.

Holy shit! Noeleen and I were dying, really, part laughter, part horror. All those nice, conservative Orthodox families, and I had to prove that I was one of the great unwashed! It was embarrassing.

But the dinner went off well. Conrad Bladey is a great raconteur, for one thing. And after a few snorts...well...you get the picture.

Still, if I ever meet art car artists again, I'm going to request photos before I invite them to dinner, unless they promise to take the bus.

On a calmer note, Handria was simply the nascent form of a "handy" car Bladey worked on for years, until it finally won the big prize in Baltimore for art cars. Here is its final incarnation, known as The Epicentral Temple of the Helping Hand.

I guess I should be thankful the car was parked in my quiet neighborhood when it was still a baby.





Copyright 2020 by Laura Harrison McBride

When is an artist not an artist?

I have loved art since I was a small child. I drew all the time, mainly horses and evening gowns, but even that predicted the path of my adult life. The first half of it was spent frequently wearing evening gowns as I went to charity balls; the second half of it was spent riding, showing and training horses and riders.

And now, in whatever is left of that life, the art part seems to be rising. To be fair, I did study art during the evening gowns phase of my adulthood, but never did much with it until recently.

And when I did, I got a shock. 

But to set the scene....

When I finally got over my terror of drawing in a group situation, and decided to study art, I wanted to properly learn my craft.  So, in the 1980s, I took anatomy and drawing classes with Robert Beverly Hale, arguably the best drawing teacher in the United States in the 20th century. Subsequently, I was invited to become a member of the Art Students League of New York, where I had studied with him; my rising to membership in that venerable body was accomplished by both study and election by other members so that they could be sure, I suppose, that one wouldn't embarrass the League by being a crappy artist. I'm still quite proud of that achievement. Although, like any artist, I'm never, ever sure the latest work isn't, in fact, crappy. Even when it is praised. Such is the temperament of an artist and perfectionist.

But despite being a perfectionist, I cannot--no really cannot--do "imitation of life" drawings and paintings, such as this one:

Unarguably, this picture could easily be a black and white photograph, but it isn't. It is a pencil drawing. It is quite astonishing in its realism, in its perfection of proportions. One might think there would be very few people who could produce work like that...and yet, the internet and the pages of art magazines for amateurs and professionals alike are littered with them. So many incredibly talented people with the time to spend both learning such perfection of craft and producing dozens of time-consuming, detailed works! It boggles the mind.

Or not.

It was only a few years ago that I learned about the camera obscura, a device known to Johannes Vermeer (see his famous painting The Girl with the Pearl Earring, 1665, below), and via which he produced the most stunningly accurate oil paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. 

The Girl with the Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer, 1665

I thought it was cheating, while admitting his paintings are stunning. But so what? Wait a couple hundred years, and voila! the Eastman Kodak Brownie camera, affordable for almost anyone, could produce similar works in a flash. But no one considered the products of the little brown boxes to be high art.

None of this really bothered me, though, until I began reading the magazine and sales circulars from the Society of All Artists (SAA) a few years ago, when I was ramping up my art production with intent to sell. The pages of both are filled with cunning devices--camera obscuras to be sure (so anyone with oil paints might conceivably be the next Vermeer), tracing paper, fixative to make tracing paper stick to photos one might want to copy...I mean might want to paint.

Yes, you see where it is. The Art Students League's intention is to serve and produce artists. Not copyists. League graduates are not expected to produce exact copies of a subject; they are expected to draw it, paint it, imbue it with some character of both the thing/person and the artist. In short, make ART, not a copy. It is no wonder I had never heard of the handy image transfer devices; the only one League students were exposed to was their own eyes and hands.

I have a problem with copying masquerading as art, with people who are using mainly mechanical means to produce what they are calling original art and I call cheap copies. But yet, they get consistent oohs and aahs when their works appear in print or on websites.  Quite disheartening. Indeed, you might as well cheer for the Xerox copier that probably fostered this unseemly confiscation of mechanical devices to the service of what was once a noble calling, if not very remunerative most of the time: producing art. (Analogy: If a musician turned on the CD player and then faked blowing the notes on his oboe, is that art?)

I've been chewing on this for a few years now, and the past couple of years also on the demand that artists posting their work--THEIR WORK, by their own hands--on social media provide not only information about the medium, but give credit if they used a reference photo they didn't shoot with their own hands. Why? It's not like they were going to pass off someone else's work as their own; it is art. Isn't it?

I have concluded that they are not, in fact, making original art, but copying an artwork made by another artist (or photographer, mainly) line for line, colour for colour, shape for shape. And, in many cases, the "art" could indeed be passed off as the photograph that was copied, which would be, in fact, illegal.

If they did that, passed off copies derived by mainly mechanical means, as their own work...what then? It is copyright infringement at its heart, its foundation. And they might rightly be sued.

Is art via mechanical means worthy of being called art? Are those who produce and sell worthy of being called artists? 

Or have they simply become human Xerox machines?

Copyright Laura Harrison McBride, 2020

Panettone--Breakfast of movie stars!

December 21, 2019

We've had a large panettone, still in its box*, on our kitchen counter for about two weeks now. It won't be opened until after Christmas, not for any reason except that we went a bit nutty on Christmas goodies to eat this year, and simply haven't got there yet. And we won't, until after two days of traveling to see friends and two days of feasting with them.

Panettone is not something I grew up with. In fact, I had only seen it in bread cookbooks until a day about 15 years ago in Baltimore. I had a friend who lived in Charles Village, a part of Baltimore tucked in behind the Johns Hopkins campus and the rougher parts of downtown, to be very unfocused about it. It was close to Roland Park, too, a fairly upscale neighborhood. Itself? Well, Charles Village has much to recommend it including a stock of lovely brick and stone Victorian and Edwardian houses. My friend lived in one with her two sons and her husband, who is an Italian doctor who is generous in treating her horse-riding buddies, most of whom are usually broke. At the time, I was among those.

Anyway, she and I and her mother and her two sons went out for lunch to Rocco's Capriccio, a well-thought-of Italian restaurant in Baltimore's Little Italy. Rocco was a friend of her husband, who had helped him get started in business.

It was a great lunch. We three ladies sat at one table and the two boys at another one where they happily talked about whatever it is a 13- and 15-year-old talk about over pizza. We adults, naturally, had some more complex dishes and wine. Of course.

I'd like to tell you about Rocco's menu, but I can't. It turns out that it closed in 2013, after a time, apparently, of sliding downward on the culinary “must visit” list, having been, for a long time, the recipient of five stars on the social media opinion pages.

As we left, Rocco greeted us, and gave my friend, her mother and me each a box containing a small panettone.

I didn't open the box right away. I was fairly broke at the time and thought it would be a nice thing with coffee as I banged the keys after Christmas to sell enough writing to keep from starving in the spring. But then I did.

What a treat! It was a lovely yeast bread, sprinkled with lemon and orange peel and vanilla. I ate as much of it as I could before it went stale. When it did, I made it into French toast, buttered and sprinkled with icing sugar and fresh lemon juice.

I've always loved Rocco for that gift, not that I knew him well as my friend did. But he gave me something just as precious on an evening a year or two later. By that time, I was dating the man who is now my husband. He worked in Frederick, MD, lived near Westminster, MD, and drove the hour+ to see me a few nights each week. One Friday in the fall, we decided to go to Rocco's. I dressed as I usually did for that sort of romantic but laid-back evening: black silky dress trousers, a white semi-sheer shirt, and dangly earrings. I had had my hair styled that day, though, and it looked quite extravagant. So I applied some red lipstick to complement the hair. And then I flung a dark red pashmina around my shoulders in case of a chill later.

Simon was dressed as always for work: khaki trousers, white dress shirt and dark blue double-breasted blazer.

When we walked in the door to Rocco's, Rocco himself was standing at the end of the bar. He greeted me warmly, remembering me from visits with my friend over the previous year or so, and said, “You look like a movie star.”

Well, that was good for my ego.

Then he looked at Simon, who is 6'2” and not scrawny, and said, “And you...you look like a bouncer.”

A masterful verbal assessment, fully accurate, but not one most people would blurt out.

And Rocco wasn't even a New Yorker!

*This year's panettone is genuine Italian, ordered via an Italian imported foods company in the UK.

 Copyright 2019, Laura Harrison McBride Please feel free to quote up to 25 words without asking; beyond that, please email me for permission via this site. Thank you.

A New York Story in camera

New York Coffee Shop Suite, c. Laura Harrison McBride

The noise of the street is left behind. The taxis honking, the delivery vans being robbed of their clinking, squeaking hand trucks' siren songs. The sounds from the pavement—stiletto heels clicking, people laughing, babies crying, the odd shout of a person signaling to a friend he noticed far ahead—all are shut off with the suddenness of a thunder clap when the second of the air-lock doors closes behind you.

The odors greet you. No exhaust fumes here, no sewer pong. No brazier smoke, in winter, from the hot-chestnut vendor's pushcarts.

Well, OK. That last odor is delightful, and lasts all too short a time, only while the Great Christmas Tree is up in Rockefeller Plaza which has, probably more than Santa walking into sponsor Macy's department store at the end of the Thanksgiving Day parade, signalled the season of joy.

Once those doors have closed, and until another seeker of warmth, light and sustenance opens them to enter, there is peace and the welcome beauty of a traditional Manhattan coffee shop. Not, mind, a coffee shop in the Starbucks mode. No. These predate designer coffee. Here, it comes in white porcelain cups rimmed with a strip of green, burgundy or blue, a stainless steel spoon perched on the saucer. (Remember saucers?) A Manhattan coffee shop opens early to serve breakfast to the hordes emerging from the subways, clambering off the bus, or hoofing it from their home to their office or shop. At 7-ish, it finds financial types there, stoking up on caffeine and calories before a hard day of mind-reading to see where the dollar, the pound, the yen will go today, and how many they can load into their own pockets.

Then relative quiet until ten or so, when office workers begin to arrive. Those who go to work early—few in Manhattan—will have been at their tasks since 8, so they are the first second wave. Then between 10:|30 and 11, the 9 a.m.-ers arrive. That's when I went, and even then, it was early for me. As a freelancer, I didn't really get started until 9:30. But the attractions of the coffee shop were such that I was willing to leave my tasks on many days, even if it meant a delayed lunch or dinner. Or none at all.

The smell of coffee, the rattle of the porcelain dishes and clank of stainless steel cutlery, the squeak of a counter stool as its occupant get s up to return to work, the soft clank of the coins she leaves as a tip. All this, and so much more, attracted me. I happily walked the two short blocks and four long ones to get there, in any weather.

“What will you have?” Betty asked each day. Had asked 100 times, probably, before that coffee shop became one of my spiritual homes. Just because I would beard any miscreant in search of journalistic fodder for my job didn't mean I would easily join in the slipstream of casual friendships that develop at a lunch counter in Manhattan. But I did, finally, with Betty as the acolyte who introduced me to the high altar of casual community.

And I loved it. All of it. The spotless counter. The spotless mirror behind it. Betty's spotless uniform, and, eventually, the perfectly filled cup of coffee that arrived before she even asked me what I wanted. She knew her customers; she knew I wanted the coffee long before she knew I wanted the connection. Before I did.

Winter in Central Park, NYC, copyright 2019, Laura Harrison McBride

As for sustenance, sometimes I wanted an English muffin, toasted and dripping with butter. Sometimes it was a slice of something sweet and delicious from the gleaming glass pie safe at the end of the counter. A slice of fat, dense, strawberry jam-topped New York cheesecake. A slice of lemon meringue pie, furnished with 2 or more inches of lightly browned meringue above the perfectly sweet-tart filling and crumbly crust. Or maybe a slice of spicy sweet potato pie topped with a huge dollop of whipped cream.

As a New Yorker would say, what's not to like? If you couldn't find comfort—warmth, food and camaraderie—in the interior of a Manhattan coffee shop, the only answer must be that your soul dried up and disappeared a long, long time ago and is past resurrecting.

I miss the gleaming silvery coffee urns, drained by hyper New Yorkers so fast that you'd never get burnt, too-long-heated coffee. Always fragrant, never fouled by neglect, like the bulbous glass pots that deliver undrinkable brown muck 'out of town.' The tall fresh OJ press, pressing hundreds of oranges into vitamin cocktails for sun- and air-starved New Yorkers. The scent of frying bacon all day long. The sweet greasy smell of that coffee shop favorite lunch, a grilled cheese on white with or without tomato. (If you order it with tomato, be warned; let it cool a bit because the thinly sliced fresh tomatoes in the middle will be way hotter than the cheese, and will burn your tongue. A mystery of science.)

About 10:30, the air-lock doors would get a workout, from the staff of the publishing house across the street. This was my favorite time; the conversation was always good, once I loosened up enough to join in, and witty. Memorable. Like the tales about Amelia Persky. But they are a story in themselves, and so shall wait a while, to be offered up to the gods of my cultural baptism with a few other notables of various stripes.

The loss of this milieu from my life is poignant and somewhat sad, possibly. But the wealth of having had it so long in my life is stronger still, a touchstone for my soul when I find myself in lands less vibrant, company less alive and interested. The memories are greater than any sadness. The memories are comforting, as the visits to Burger Heaven were all those years ago. They will live in me forever, and I bless them.

Copyright 2019, Laura Harrison McBride

Christmas at the Pub with Dad, oil painting by Laura Harrison McBride

The love of pets is important to mankind, I think. This man, at a pub in Gwithian, Cornwall, a couple of years ago, clearly thinks so. When he visits the pub, he arrives at off hours so there won't be a crowd and he can let his two Jack Russells sit at the bar with him, on their own paw-print stool covers to protect the pub's upholstery. It was kind of him to let me take their picture so I could paint it, even though I will never sell it. I would sell giclee prints. Maybe I should sell them in support of a local animal rescue organization; yes, I think I will. But the original stays with me; as the former director of the Boca Raton (US) Humane Society, I understand that to many people, pets are their best friend and sometimes even their family.

Yesterday, on an international FB art page, a man with considerable technical talent posted two of his pet portraits. They were very good. But then he insulted every pet-lover on the planet by saying he didn't do them anymore because it was stupid to spend time/money on pets in preference to portraits of people, family and friends and, one must assume, "important people."

Important people. What does that even mean?

Have you ever seen a homeless person and his or her pet on the street? I have. There were three homeless men in Limoux, France, the year we lived in nearby Quillan, who were accompanied by their dogs. The shop owners allowed them the use of their entries to shelter in and, I hope, also gave them food. They were not run off, as they would be in the UK.

There was one homeless man who sat on the curb in outside our local Carrefour supermarket, seeking donations. Needless to say, he always got one from me, and the dog got a box of kibble as well. AND I saw several other shoppers do the same. 

That so-called artist who dismissed people's love of their pets and wish to memorialise them and see them in paint? He maybe a technician, but he's no artist.

Copyright 2019 by Laura Harrison McBride

Art food

 

New York Diner Suite; Actually pencil drawing from about 1985, but I didn't have a crumpet drawing....so close enough.

I have just finished a crumpet, crunchy outside and soft inside, butter dripping from all its little holes. The model for the American "English muffin," crumpets are the ultimate comfort food to me. Today, I needed comfort food.

Why? Well, because, assuming I might have 15 more years of active working life, I need to get a move on and frankly, the pains that have dogged my life for three years were particularly gruesome this morning. A morning Simon had to take my head shot for my Irish passport renewal. A morning when I had to package two Giclee prints to send, one to Canada and one to the US. A morning after I signed up for a very expensive website on GoDaddy. It's probably the 10th art website I've had...but it is going to be the one that finally pushes me to sell my artwork as avidly as I sold my writing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah that little voice in my head is saying. And with some reason to be believed.

Profession 1: Writing

When I decided it would be better for me to be a journalist than to teach English Lit., my desire to spend my life in a classroom being on a par with my desire to break out in permanent itchy scabs, I switched departments, went to work on a Masters in Journalism, took the core courses I thought I needed, and got out of there when my major professor told me to. She knew I didn't WANT to teach, not even journalism, so I didn't need a master's degree, never mind a doctorate; I wanted to go to NYC--home--and write. So I did. 
 

One of my riding teachers, Peter Krukoski, used a commissioned painting I did in the 90s of one of his students as teh cover for the year's show program. I'm quite proud of that!

Profession 2: Showing horses and teaching riding

The day I decided I wanted to learn to ride and jump horses, I signed up for weekly lessons. A month later it was two lessons a week. Then three. Then I went to "horse college"--literally--and within five years or so, having trained my own horse, won ribbons, etc., I was teaching the sport. (Apparently, teaching horsemanship is OK with my personality, and god knows it is more interesting than being cooped up indoors with reluctant students. People who take riding lessons are avid, the opposite of reluctant.)

So why did I abandon the pursuit between the journalism I studied in my 20s, the riding in my 40s? Why did the study of my 30s--art--get no respect? After all, I chose a very find professional school, the Art Students League of NY, with its great teachers: Robert Beverly Hale (anatomy and drawing), Tom Fogarty (oil painting), Gregory d'Alessio (watercolours), all passed on now. And I was elected to membership in due course, a sign that one is at least a competent artist.

It might be about caring. Too much, perhaps. I care, wildly, about journalism. I am appalled at the level to which it has sunk the past two decades and the past two years...well, just don't get me started. And horses. I love horses, but I also love the sport of hunter-jumper riding, both athletic and artistic inherently.

Profession 3: Artist

But perhaps I really do care too much. I knew from the start that I was a good journalist; same with riding. But art? Well, I shied away from even studying it for YEARS when an early teacher looked at me cross-eyed. Later--years of no art later--Mr. Hale, on assessing my portfolio, said only, "These are very delicate." I took that to mean they sucked. BUT...and considering the times I had flown that coop before...I persisted. And then there was Tom Fogarty.

I had not yet bought the kit for oil painting by the first day of class, so I took my newsprint pad and Conte crayons and did a portrait of the model as a study for an eventual painting. As he passed through the room, Mr. Fogarty pulled up a stool near mine, looked at my work in progress, and said, "I really admire that."

The drawing Tom Fogarty liked, the drawing that convinced me I was an OK artist.

It was enough. I decided that if Tom Fogarty liked my work, then it would be good enough. So I continued.

But it was fits and starts. I'd work at art for a while, and sell a few things while writing and/or showing horses and teaching. I'm good at trompe l'oeil, and several of my commissions have been for that. But I've sold oil paintings and watercolours, too. Just not consistently and not with any forethought. Because then I'd have to produce....and I'd have to sell. As with my freelance writing work. 

And that scares the crap out of me. Selling writing was easy. Art? Not so much.  I think.  Maybe I'm wrong....

But I'm in now for more than a penny and more than a pound, so needs must. Or maybe I'm just reluctant because I know it will be my last professional pursuit during this term at the Earth School. If I don't start, I can't finish, right? And then I'll be immortal.

I guess I'll just have to risk it, and take up the challenge.

Shit.

Copyright 2019 by Laura Harrison McBride