The (conspicuously absent) consolation of art

June 2024 Issue

LinkedIn isn't really the right place for a confessional, but, given that this one connects to my professional work and may contain something helpful for other people, I thought there may be some value in it. So here we go.

The Positive

I'll start with the positive part. Depending on how you look at things, the last 6/12/24 months have been the most professionally successful in my entire life. At my university position, I was promoted to full professor. On LinkedIn, I have an astounding, global reach, thanks to all of you. LinkedIn Learning keeps giving me opportunities to make new courses. And, as far as my income goes, I'm at a lifetime peak that makes things possible that my wife and I could never have imagined, such as supporting our three children in college (at the state college where I teach and we don't have to pay tuition) and being able to travel extensively. That said, we still don't have a Maserati, and I rode my bike -- the one I bought used in the local classifieds a few years ago -- to my co-working space today. But, professionally, things are great, and that's very good news.

The Challenge

Here's the challenging part. Despite it all, I have had to deal with chronic, low-grade depression that has waxed and waned for essentially my entire life. "Dysthymia" is the clinical term for it, although I prefer ye olde tyme term "melancholia" or "melancholy," which has a much broader range of associations. Melancholy has been, at times, connected with people who are artistic, creative, introspective, intellectual, and/or compassionate, all of which are good things. (See, for example, "In Praise of Melancholy and How It Enriches Our Capacity for Creativity" by Maria Popova or "Melancholy in the Art of Introspection" by Carla Groh.) I just wish it could come without the droopiness and anomie that have been so familiar my entire life, including the decades before my professional success.

Where Art Comes In

I mention all of this because my wife reminded me (again) that, from her perspective, the happiest/least droopy time of my life was the three-year span from 2011 to 2014 where I was engaged in daily creative work. This started when I took a sabbatical from my university position to spend a year studying arts technology at the University of Utah, with the goal of rounding out my data visualization training. In the process, I created a piece using motion capture on modern dance improvisations, which was then projected onto gallery walls. This led to a commission from Repertory Dance Theatre, a professional modern dance company here in Salt Lake City, to collaborate with my wife, choreographer Jacque Bell, on a dance and projection piece called "Hello World." It also led to a Presidential Fellowship for Faculty Scholarship at my school, Utah Valley University, that supported work in live video recording, manipulation, and projection looping for modern dance performances, culminating in a collection of pieces called "Dance Loops." (You can see videos for all of these at this link.)

I really did enjoy this work. I learned how to program in Processing for the improv piece and "Hello World," then I learned how to work with Max/MSP/Jitter for "Dance Loops." I got to collaborate with amazing artists, and I got to see our work performed locally and nationally. Those experiences also led directly to some of my professional work for LinkedIn Learning, where the second course I ever made for them, in 2012, was on data visualization in Processing (and which you may still be able to access here). I also taught a special topics course on Processing at the University, so it all connects.

Art in Absentia

The trick is that I haven't been involved in deliberate artistic work for the last ten years. My wife and I go to dance and theatre performances all the time, and I love going to museums and reading poetry. (We live in Salt Lake City, Utah, but we have memberships at both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. UPDATE: And now the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, or UMOCA, and the Utah Museum of Fine Art, or UMFA.) I also love making my videos for datalab.cc and LinkedIn Learning, which I consider creative projects, but they're not art, per se. I discovered cycling three years ago, and I love it dearly and I know it's good for me, but, again, it's not art. It seems that art – or the making of it – is making itself conspicuous by its absence in my life, and I need to fix that.

I realize, of course, that other things have happened over the last decade that could have impacted my well-being (and that of others). For one thing, the Pandemic turned everybody's lives upside down. For me, that included a dramatic and semi-permanent loss of face-to-face contact with my students and university colleagues. For another, I've now had Covid three times (including last week; and this is despite being fully vaccinated at every opportunity), and who knows what the consequences of that will be. And, of course, our three children went from being 10/12/14 years old to 20/22/24 years old, which brought its own life-changing series of events.

But I believe that my wife was right: I was happiest when I was actively making art. I love teaching people to work with data, and I will continue doing that, but the time has come for me to re-engage with art as a consistent, deliberate, personal practice. I believe that doing so would make me better at my other professional work, but, more than anything, it would make me better. And that's the best possible goal.