My Life As an Art Project

Life is artful; it has to be. At once both particular and universal, manifesting as individual lives while simultaneously functioning in a species-wide manner, life navigates through living and non-living environments; through its collective experience, life finds ways to endure.

Artfulness is available to all of us, a combination of inherited biological mechanisms and awareness of survival skills developed through direct experience. Survival is the outcome of being artful enough.

There are degrees of artfulness, from barely enough to exceptional, i.e.: our ability to play with the world. As for exceptional, we use words like ingenious, clever, crafty, adroit, and masterful to describe it. But embedded in artfulness is “art.”

I loved art as a child and indulged myself in it fully. The world was my canvas, and I liberally covered it by playing with my ideas. For example, at about ten years old, I tied colored thread and yarn from cabinet knobs to bed legs, from shelf supports to lamp bases, from door latches to switch plates, and to and from any and every possible fixed location in my bedroom; ultimately, the room was filled with a taut, colorful, spiderweb-like 3-D sculpture, which would resist – but ultimately yield – to my moving body.

Later on, having removed small motors from various appliances like clocks and fans and having affixed painted cardboard discs to each motor and wired them to an electrical source controlled by switches at the head of my bed, I could set any of them or all of them spinning. So too, I controlled various light bulbs placed around my room.

Gratefully, my parents indulged my crazy creativity, although had they known to what extent I was turning my room into an art project instead of doing my homework I’d have been in trouble.

In my twenties, I did graphic design, and later on learned to artfully run a B&B and develop websites. I indulged in the art of civic leadership. Not all my art projects turned out well, but I learned from all of them.

Now, at the ripe old age of 77, I’m still playing and indulging my artfulness in print and in the garden. Writing a weekly column, and I’ve now written close to one thousand of them, comes down to artfully playing with words. And gardening, which in my case includes forty-plus years of collecting and displaying roughly 400 exotic plants, is another art project. Caring for living things requires a particular type of attention to artfulness – call it heartfulness – or they die. Accordingly, I sometimes call them “my 400 mouths to feed.”

We can be artful in all sorts of ways, as parents, grandparents, and friends. One measure of artfulness is to what degree our activities find harmony with others and the world at large. For me, artfulness is an attitude, a way of living that applies to all the things I do, be it cooking, doing dishes, folding laundry, and using a Water-Pik. On the one hand, artfulness and mindfulness are often the same, yet on the other hand, for some things, practice makes perfect, and I can rely on my body’s natural artfulness.

I’m not sure if there is an artful way to die, but like all of us, I will find out. In the words of Groucho Marx, my plan is to live forever, or to die trying. Meanwhile, living artfully keeps me busy.