Do you have an EXIT STRATEGY?
Talking about death is a part of life. We need to have those conversations with our aging parents, with our spouses and even with our children. These are very personal choices and they’re usually disclosed in very serious tones. Luckily for me, my family and I tend to joke about it. Maybe it’s our way of dealing with the impermanence of life. I once told my Dad that we’d bury him standing up, because he couldn’t sit down for five minutes when he was alive, why start now. I tell my wife, I want my body jettisoned into deep space, toward another solar system and let those other civilizations figure out what to do with me.
Back in the 90s, living in Pennsylvania a neighbor of my girlfriend’s aunt was an artist. He was a professor at a nearby college until his death earlier that year. When she found out through the aunt that both of us were artists, she invited us to come over to the house and take what supplies we wanted.
Entering an artist’s studio after they’re gone is a weird sensation. Part peaceful sanctuary, part trespassing. At the time, I didn’t pay much attention to those feelings. I just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible; the pain, the widow was in, was still quite palpable. At the time, I was reluctant to be sucked into that vortex of emotion.
We walked away with a couple of large pre-stretched canvases, the kind where people used to tack the canvas to the stretcher bars with tiny nails. My girlfriend took some copper sheeting material, her hope was to make something out of it, jewelry or some kind of etching. Being Indian, the spices and incense used in the household lingered on the canvasses for months. It was like his spirit was still there.
Years later, I fell in love with Jessica, a fellow actor. After a nuanced courtship during a production of Julius Caesar, we finally started our relationship in earnest. Some time passed and we knew we were right for each other, so we bought a house and three years later got married. In the spring of 2006, we found out her father was diagnosed with lung cancer. He didn’t smoke, didn’t work in a factory or anywhere dangerous — he’d been an art teacher for the past 25 years.
When my wife was 15 her mother was diagnosed with leukemia.
This was the type caused by the chemical benzene that was used in her screen printing classes at a nearby high school in Southern Indiana. Her proximity with the chemical despite the precautions she took, was not enough and she died 6 months after her diagnosis. A lawsuit soon followed, and it wasn’t until some discovery files were handed over to her father’s attorney that someone had misplaced a Post-It note essentially saying, “Don’t let them find out about the benzene.” That admission had changed the course of the trial (which could have dragged on for many years) and her family was rewarded a small some incomparable to the pain of their loss.
In the winter of 2008, I was home when I got the call. My wife had headed out to her family’s home two weeks earlier as things were not going well for her father. Her stepmom, a career nurse, was caring for him around the clock. Through the diagnosis and treatments, she was there along with my wife and her brother at the end.
As a freelance artist, I had some flexibility. I booked a flight and was out the door the next day, my head swirling with all these thoughts of love, loss, and life after art. On a different flight, I had remembered a woman lean over to me while I was sketching and say, “It must be so nice to be an artist.” As any creative will tell you, and some will struggle to explain, that you can’t shut off creativity. It just won’t stop. And I told the woman just that…and I still don’t think she understood. It wasn’t until recently I realized that while we are fortunate to have these innate abilities to most people who do not have them, we are truly magicians — creating something out of nothing.
But what happens to those creations once we are gone?
In the 1970s my father-in-law, Colin, had begun building his own house. He’d had a background in construction before attending art school at Ball State. He played in bands and eventually settled down south of where he grew up in Indianapolis, in the unusually named small town called French Lick. Apparently, the French had settled in the area and the deer were attracted by the salt in the limestone cliffs. There, Colin bought some land, lived in a trailer and dreamed up a house of his own design. He would split his time between teaching art in the Springs Valley school district, and as much time as the seasons would allow, constructing his new home. As his family grew by two they were finally able to move into the first floor of the place. Like most art projects, one can never really be “done”. But unlike most art projects, the house was not abandoned. It was just always in a state of construction. Eventually the master bedroom resided on the third floor over-looking five cleared acres with a man-made pond and a mix of hardwood and pine tree forest just beyond. The rafters were still exposed in some places but wherever there was walled space there was art. It was a mix of large graphite renderings, screen-printed designs, ink drawings, and even a few of my oil paintings. The second floor of the house had family room, as well as the studio that lived in a very well-lit greenhouse-like alcove, was generously filled with drafting tables, taborets, camera equipment and even a computer workstation. He had all the toys.
And now those things needed to be sorted. In fact, truth be told, he was a bit of pack-rat — I mean no disrespect in the least. Out of all my art friends I’m one of those few artists who relishes a clean studio and has a place for everything. Colin would buy multiples of things because he’d forgotten he’d already purchased them beforehand. How many photographers loupes does one need? Three? Four? No, really, one is plenty.
I’ll be honest here. As an artist we can’t help but be attracted to more art supplies. It’s like nectar to us. To me, I see old art materials and I think, “That’s when they still gave a crap about making quality stuff.” But I was hounded by a sense of guilt. That I should inherit any of this. In fact, to avoid those feelings I decided to sort out the garage and all of his tools.
That’s when I realized that his “collector” habits were a little extreme.
It took me a day just to clear enough space for me to work. Then I found and sorted hundreds of tools, multiples upon multiples of items, until a few days later we had some semblance of a garage. The whole while, I was thinking: “What do I do? Do I make recommendations of where the art supplies should go? Do I even mention it?”
So, I waited to hear what my wife and Kathy, her stepmother would propose. I’d go through it all collecting and cleaning to essentially create an inventory of not only Colin’s supplies, but even stuff from Theresa, his first wife. It was overwhelming.
It was decided that I could take what I wanted. And though I wanted it all, I also wanted to be reasonable. The large metal flat files were not coming back to Seattle. The drafting table was unreasonably large, and I really didn’t have room for it. So, I settled on all the brushes and pencils and antiquated tools I could find and — the paper. The paper alone, with a street value of thousands of dollars was astounding. Some of the best quality Arches watercolor paper, Bristol paper from the 70s, mylar sleeves for art, just an astounding assortment of riches that I had very little space for. I did settle on a smaller set of flat files just to hold some of it. In the end I took a third of what he had. I even inherited Theresa’s French easel, watercolors and Rembrandt pastels. Not to be maudlin, but at that moment I felt quite moved and fortunate to be able to make something out of nothing.
But what would happen to all the rest? And for that matter, all the art from that past 30 some years of two people’s lives?
As my wife and I laid there in her childhood bedroom we talked. The conversations ran deep. What do we do with the house? Kathy could not manage a house so large or even afford the utilities being out of work and not yet retirement age. She was still taking care of her elderly mother up in Indianapolis. Her own son, Matthew and his wife, Jennifer, were there helping to sort out everything. As a family we’d assessed that the house had too many costly repairs for Kathy to stay. A smaller place was needed and that the art would have to go somewhere. Jessica turned to me and as she is good at doing, pointed out the thing that is most needed: “Make sure you have a plan for your life’s work. Because I’m not going to know what to do with it.”
Those words have haunted me ever since. In the following years since, I’ve been thinking about it on a regular basis. And for a period, I was even preparing for my own death, like I knew when it was coming. While we artists like to believe we’re unique snowflakes (and believe me, I’m no exception) I have to believe that we will all either face this problem and address it or ignore it completely. A lot of it comes down to you. Does it mean you’re a bad person if you don’t? No, probably not.
But, think of your life as a work of art. And then think of your legacy of what you’re leaving behind. Seriously, look around you, look at the beautiful mess you’ve created and now, think of tomorrow where that mess belongs to those you dearly love.
No matter how organized you are, it’s still a mess to someone else. They still have to take time from their lives to sort through everything. The true test of their love, and the time and need to heal from your loss and the mountain that you’ve created will all be put to the test. There was a high-paid famous illustrator named J.C. Leyendecker, the Tom Cruise of his day, who lived lavishly during the Great Gatsby era of the 1920s. Upon his death, his model and lover, Mr. Beech, sold many of his paintings and canvasses for cheap in a garage sale and those paintings today are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. We’d love to think our work will garner untold riches long after our death. And maybe some will, but you’ll never know. The frustration of letting go, and moving on is only exacerbated by the sheer volume of physical work you’ve created.
We’re on a cusp right now…many visual artists today, work digitally. And the sum of their life work can be stored on a thumb-drive that fits in your pocket. Still, there will be some who move between mediums, like me, now and in the future. So, what do we do to help our loved ones?
I’m a middle-aged comic book artist, I also paint on canvas, illustration board and watercolor paper. I have over 70 large sketchbooks, reams of loose figure-drawing studies and other people’s original art that I’ve collected and framed through the years. Can you see the problem here?
Sure, Jessica could sell, donate and give-away all the easels, flat files, drafting tables, lighting kits, camera equipment, paper, paints, pastels and hundreds of other supplies. She could sell the computer monitors, Wacom tablets, scanners and esoteric equipment that she will have no clue about what it does. Even after all that physical stuff, there’s the emotional content of the work. The spirit of the artist’s life, if you will.
One idea that came to mind, and this is especially if you’re not a “famous artist” or currently working with a gallery owner, is to befriend someone who owns a gallery or who has experience in curating shows. Someone with a trained objective eye. As unrealistic as it sounds they may have ideas on how you can curate your own life’s work. How you may be able to assign a person to help sort, organize, catalog, and even sell some of your work for your loved ones after your passing.
Creating relationships like this are beneficial in a variety of ways. Learning about archiving and organizing from someone who has to deal with hundreds of artists may help you think about how you create and what you use to create. While you may not want that kind influence or interference in your “process” it stands to reason that at some point someone is going to have to deal with it.
Most of the sketchbooks I have I make myself. I tend to draw on loose leaf paper on a variety of scraps and Post-It notes. I make covers for them and get them bound at print shops. I include title pages where I affix labels generally explaining what years the sketches are from and what they thematically contain. I try to curate them in a way where there’s some semblance of a pattern, theme or quality.
For canvasses and illustration boards, I mark the backs with a title and date.
Some illustrators like Frank Schoonover, kept tedious records of his paintings, what publication they were for, who he sold them to and how much they paid. While that’s a great idea, especially for tax purposes, it’s not terribly practical for many of us. We do so much in terms of getting our work online, it more or less is our archive. But if you have a person in mind who you’d like for them to inherit physical work, create a document, a logbook for that very purpose. To include it in a will may be impractical because we generate so much. Of course, if there are specific pieces you want to go to friends and family, then yes, include it.
For the rest of the work, that is available for sale or is constantly running in and out of galleries creating a logbook could prove to be much-needed guidance.
See if you can’t develop a good practice to sit down in-between projects and assignments and take a few minutes to add to this “studio diary”. It could be physical or digitally stored in the cloud for easier access. If it’s physical, you may change your mind…so write it in pencil. Also, as pieces get sold or friends die before you, you can also reassign or erase completely where appropriate. Death is a messy business, so being flexible and prepared helps.
Depending on the volume, and your “notoriety” some colleges accept collections for study. I believe Milt Caniff, the creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon comic strips, collections reside in both Syracuse University as well as Ohio State University where there’s a dedicated research room. Cartoonists like Caniff who did a daily strip for 40+ years must have had a lot to give.
Not everyone can be Andy Warhol, whose collection is housed in his own museum; no matter how far your 15 minutes of fame stretches. A man whose dealers, family and entourages were available to influence and direct the posthumous results of his artistic life. For the rest of us, if we’re lucky, we have our spouse, partners, friends, family, and perhaps a dealer that we leave in the wake of our creations. Being realistic about it now will help them deal with a very trying unrealistic future that could take years to navigate.
Otherwise, they’ll be carrying this stuff with them for the rest of their life, like a ghost trapped in purgatory, not knowing what to do with it. How to separate themselves from it, if indeed that’s what they want to do, and move on.
While my answers are not for everyone, I do hope that the seed of the question will have the same ripple effect as it did when Jessica asked me all those years ago. It’s something I’ll revisit over and over again until I die. In the meantime, she’s requested that I give her a few alternatives to the “deep space burial” request. If my ashes are packed in glorious fireworks and shot out over Puget Sound, then I guess that would be close enough to stardom for me.
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