From Photo Hobbyist to Featured Artist at an Art Gallery

This is going to seem more like a journal entry than a blog post, but it's been a fun weekend and I wanted to share my day in the sun.

Two months ago, I walked into a beautiful art gallery, the Silver Sycamore Gallery of Fine Arts in Sainte Genevieve, Missouri. It's a beautiful art gallery located about an hour's drive south of St. Louis, Missouri. After looking at some of the work then on display, I showed the gallery manager (Leon Basler) some of my own work on my iPhone.

To my surprise, Leon took an immediate intense interest in my work and offered to display my photography, further offering to designate me to be the "featured artist" during  a citywide celebration: "The Ste. Genevieve Annual Holiday Christmas Festival."  Of course I said yes.  Leon eventually decided to display all 30 images that I hauled down in a van earlier this week. Displayed, they took up half of the gallery. What an honor! The gallery owners and the people stopping by the gallery treated me like a celebrity, which is serving as an antidote for my bout of imposter syndrome. More about that below.

 

The opening was this weekend. If you click on the title to this article, you will find a gallery of many photos from this weekend, including some of my displayed photos.

Also on display this weekend were dazzling paintings by at least three other artists who were in attendance, including 90-year old Charles Rhinehart and 92-year old illustrator/painter, Don Langeneckert, who still paints every day, and who will be the featured artist in an upcoming show.  Leon's own works were also on display. Leon, who also works as a pilot and an engineer, has explored so many styles of painting in so many ways, that you would be certain that a room filled with his work was actually the work of 5 or 6 different artists; check out his website.  Also at the gallery, across from my photos, one can admire the exquisite paintings of Ali Cavanaugh.  It's truly stunning work, which you will see if you visit her website. 

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Bertrand Russell Tossed me a Life Preserver in 1943, Before I Was Born

As a 17-year old boy, I was incredibly lucky to find a book by Bertrand Russell at the local public library.  This was a key time in my development--I was skeptical about many things back then, but I felt alone. The people in my life were earnestly telling me things about life, politics and religion that didn't make any sense to me and discussions with them mostly resulted only in strange and condescending lectures.

I remember the joy and relief I felt when I first started reading the first paragraph of Russell's 1943 essay, "AN OUTLINE OF INTELLECTUAL RUBBISH," which was a chapter in a book I found at the library.

Man is a rational animal-so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents. On the contrary, I have seen the world plunging continually further into madness. I have seen great nations, formerly leaders of civilization, led astray by preachers of bombastic nonsense. I have seen cruelty, persecution, and superstition increasing by leaps and bounds, until we have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogy regrettably surviving from a bygone age. All this is depressing, but gloom is a useless emotion. In order to escape from it, I have been driven to study the past with more attention than I had formerly given to it, and have found, as Erasmus found, that folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived. The follies of our own times are easier to bear when they are seen against the background of past follies. In what follows I shall mix the sillinesses of our day with those of former centuries. Perhaps the result may help in seeing our own times in perspective, and as not much worse than other ages that our ancestors lived through without ultimate disaster.


Russell's full essay is much longer than this excerpt and it is filled with many other pointed observations, permeated throughout with Russell's wry sense of humor. Until the teenaged version of me saw this essay, I thought I was alone in my skepticism. That's a difficult place to be trapped for a teenager. This was in the 1970's, long before the Internet. I sometimes wondered whether there was something wrong with me. I didn't think so, but when I would express doubts about religion, for example, everyone else got quiet and started to look nervous The only exception was my mother, who often had the courage to ask simple questions. As I am writing this article, my mother is a vibrant and independent-living 87 year old.  How lucky I am in that regard, too. I sometimes thank her for her unbridled curiosity and "blame" her for the fact that I became somewhat subversive.  She laughs and says she doesn't know what I'm talking about.

Reading this essay was a joyride for the 17-year old version of me. I discovered that I was not alone. I learned that it is critically important to speak up, even when you are the only one in the room taking a controversial position. When I first read Russell's essay, I learned that I was not crazy. This was the beginning of a whole new way of thinking for me, and it gave me the courage to take stronger stands on my own against things that made no sense to me.

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The Many Benefits of Playing Music

My parents offered me the chance to take guitar lessons when I was 7, and I agreed to do that, so now, decades later, I'm doing what many guitar players are doing: Playing self-learned keyboards! Truly, I am grateful to my parents for digging deep to buy me a guitar and provide me with lessons. I'm still playing lots of music--it is a wonderful way to spend time on planet Earth. Here's one my most recent compositions, which I call "Striding."



As much as a digital studio (Logic Pro) provides endless enjoyment, I also still love playing the guitar, absolutely love it. And I love my guitars. If the house ever caught fire, I'd work hard to save them. There is a lot to love about music, especially if you end up hitting a high enough level of competence that you are comfortable sharing your music with others in your community. I was lucky in that regard. In my late teens, I was co-band leader for a 7-piece jazz rock band that played throughout St. Louis. I treasure those days.

But now I learn that there are many other benefits to playing music that are backed by science. "Music Lessons Were the Best Thing Your Parents Ever Did for You, According to Science" lists 13 of them, along with links to the science. Check out this article for explanations and links to the science. This is an impressive list:

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The Lack of Free Play is Damaging our Children

"In many ways, America has given up on childhood, and on children." From the NYT, it's really getting difficult to find happy well adjusted young adults because we've (their caretakers) deprived them of many opportunities to attempt (and sometimes, to fail) to form relationships all on their own. Too much well-intentioned parent-structured play time is making for anxiety-ridden and depressed young adults.  They are struggling to figure out this alien-seeming thing of learning to form meaningful relationships, and it's driving more than a few of them to suicide.

What follows is anecdotal, but I am sure it could be established statistically: When I and many of my well-adjusted peers were kids, we left the house in the morning and we played all day. We came home when it started to get dark.  When we disagreed with each other, there were no adults to adjudicate the differences. We did that ourselves and we figured it out well enough often enough. We didn't have ANY adults telling us how to play. No one arranged play dates for us. We chose who to spend time with. If another kid was a pain in the ass, we avoided him/her, and he/she would need to learn make adjustments in order to get back in our social graces. Same thing for me, of course. If any of us offended someone, we didn't run to our parents to negotiate with their parents; rather, we needed to go to the fear and figure something out on our own (though many parents did provide a good listening ear in the evening).
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Coddled Children Grow up Self-Disruptive

In The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Attorney Greg Lukianoff (founder of FIRE) and moral psyhchologist Jonathan Haidt address America’s mushrooming inability to engage in productive civil discourse. Increasing numbers of people are claiming that they cannot cope with ideas that challenge their own world view. They sometimes claim that ideas that challenge their own ideas are "not safe." In dozens of well-publicized cases, rather than work to counteract "bad" ideas with better ideas, they work to muzzle speaker by disrupting presentations or even running the purportedly offensive speakers off campus. There is a related and growing problem. We cannot talk with each other at all regarding many many important issues. We shout each other down and use the heckler's veto. These maladies are especially prominent on some American college campuses, but these problems are also rapidly spreading to the country at large, including corporate America. Consider this 2016 example featuring the students of Yale having a "discussion" with Professor Nicholas Christakis: You would never guess it from this video alone, but this mass-meltdown was triggered after child development specialist Erika Christakis (wife of Nicholas), sent this email to students. This incident at Yale is one of many illustrations offered by Haidt and Lukianoff as evidence of a disturbing trend.  Here's another egregious example involving Dean Mary Spellman at Claremont McKenna College who was run out of her college after committing the sin of writing this email to a student.  More detail here.  The authors offer this as the genesis of the overall problem:

In years past, administrators were motivated to create campus speech codes in order to curtail what they deemed to be racist or sexist speech. Increasingly, however, the rationale for speech codes and speaker disinvitations was becoming medicalized: Students claimed that certain kinds of speech—and even the content of some books and courses—interfered with their ability to function. They wanted protection from material that they believed could jeopardize their mental health by “triggering” them, or making them “feel unsafe.”
The solution offered by Lukianoff and Haidt is to take a moment to stop to recognize what they call the “Three Bad Ideas.”

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