**WARNING**
This newsletter contains themes of grief, death, genocide, and war. If your heart isn’t strong enough to take these, I offer you my love and the gentle instruction to close this message and read something else.
When Mum was dying I would take the 5,000-mile trip from Seattle to England every eight to twelve weeks. Each time I packed a basic art kit and a sketchbook, thinking I would lean on my art as a way of getting through the distress of watching her become weaker and weaker as cancer strangled her body.
I never used the sketchbook.
Witnessing my beautiful, courageous Mum gradually leave this earth completely choked my creativity. There was simply no room in my brain for art. Every ounce of my processing power was directed at caring for her (and my dad) and keeping myself “safe”.
I was in survival mode. Not being able to access creativity was a completely normal stress response.
Recently, I’ve felt that stress response return.
***
I’ve been absent for a couple of weeks. I’ve been ill, living in a fever and medication-induced haze and unable to write. I now find myself “behind” on several writing projects but when I sit at my laptop, the words are hard to find.
I *should* be writing the next part of my Artist Manifesto, but honestly, anything I have to say about culture feels trite, meaningless, irrelevant.
How can I advise you on being a better artist when humans haven’t even figured out how to live peacefully?
We should all be sent back to the Garden of Eden classroom and made to enroll in “Humanities 101: How to be kind to each other.”
***
I feel woefully lacking in how to respond to the planet's current state.
I’ve been taking a class where we create 3D objects of things we’ve drawn or painted. It’s a great class. Fun. But I find myself wondering if it’s bad taste to make a papier-mâché sculpture of a dead child.
I need the art class, “Ways Artists Can Respond to Genocide.”
I make a list of all the art classes the world needs but the list gets Monty Python-dark very quickly:
“Plein Air Painting For War Zones”
“Still Life Painting: Literally, They’re All Dead”
“Landscape Painting for Painters Whose Land Has Been Bombed To Shit”
***
I find myself breaking my own rule and reading the comments under a pro-Palestine Instagram post. A Ukrainian woman is begging other commenters not to forget about the war in Ukraine. Someone else weighs in about the humanitarian crises in Congo and Sudan.
Genocide Watch currently has TWELVE genocide emergencies highlighted in its latest report—an emergency classed as “when the genocidal process has reached the stage of genocidal massacres and other acts of genocide.”
Twelve!
That’s the exact same number as bullet points in my artist manifesto.
Renewed genocide in Darfur and Sudan. Just Start!
Jihadist genocide of Christians in Nigeria. Be You!
Artist manifestos are useless in conflict zones.
***
I’ve been drifting in and out of sickness the whole of May. I don’t have the energy to create art even if my brain were willing.
Every time I returned home from looking after Mum I would be sick. Really sick. Once I literally couldn’t walk for almost a month. I used to arrive back at Seattle airport, drag my suitcase up the escalator to where my husband was waiting and collapse into his embrace, sobbing uncontrollably. I spent all my time back home recovering so I could get back to Mum.
My urge to create would return just as I was about to leave for England again and art would gush out of me like an oil blowout. It would explode in raw, unfiltered, brave gestures of emotion that were scary, wild, angry and ugly, but sometimes beautiful, fragile and delicate too.
There is no “correct” way to respond creatively to the horrors humanity inflicts upon itself. Make art, don’t make art. Make beautiful art, make ugly art. Make angry art, make art about peace.
Make all of it, make none of it. Every response is valid.
Omar and Herz are two young men living in northern Gaza. Every day they post a video on Instagram sharing their daily routine in the war zone. They play football, organise a chess competition, search for flour at the market, get haircuts and visit a café for lunch. Normal activities are set against a backdrop of devastation.
Some of the comments under their posts are revealing. The everyday life depicted by the two youths doesn’t correspond with how some people think life in a conflict zone *should* look.
I remember after Mum had her first chemotherapy session—it was six hours long—she got home, stripped the beds, washed all the bedlinen and pegged it out onto the washing line in the garden.
“Mum, what are you doing?” I asked.
“Well, it’s a good drying day.” She responded and flashed me one of her big grins. I couldn’t argue with her, it WAS a good drying day—sunny and windy.
That’s what humans do. We find ways of living. And those tiny acts of living are what keep us going.
Those outside the maelstrom don’t get to decide how those within *should* respond.
***
In his book, ‘Die Wise’, Stephen Jenkinson says that the Dying (that’s all of us) and the Dead, “are the same people, separated by a little time and a little breath.”
I love this quote. I love it so much I asked the celebrant to include it in Mum’s funeral service.
I want to add that those of us living in peace and those living in conflict are separated only by a few centimetres on a map.
We are all the same people.
Much love to you x
JC
You might enjoy reading this post about Ukrainian artist Iryna Maksymova
Also,
Powerful weaving of past and present, personal and global. I was also grateful for Patti Smith’s post. I saw a smiling concentration camp inmate in a photograph from the Holocaust while visiting the Jewish quarter in Prague recently that has left me gut punched. He was sitting on the lip of a huge digging project, smiling gently in the sunshine. Probably grateful for sunshine. A moment of rest. A reminder we cannot, each of us, hold onto the whole of it, mentally, always.
Beautifully put together post. There are no shoulds are there. Just whatever gets you through. Sending love x