Art as Transformation: My Process

“Barney Frank has entered hospice.”

This news item jolted me; Barney was the first Congressman to voluntarily come out as gay, and a friend during my early years in Washington. When I was thinking about running for Congress, he advised me to not run as an “out” candidate, but to not hide who I was either. That was good advice in 1992, as I won a primary Congressional election but lost the general.

We stayed in touch until he left Congress. He’s still one of the smartest people I ever met.

This sort of snapshot moment reminds me how different my life is than it was, and how different from what I thought it would be.

Another such moment was a May 3 fundraiser for Congresswoman Kathy Castor, whose Tampa-oriented District has been eviscerated by the Florida Governor and Legislature in an effort to elect more Republican Congressmen in this November election.

There I saw many people from my political career, but also from my music career. A old friend reminded me we were on the search committee that selected the current Musical Director of the Florida Orchestra, Michael Francis.

I thought about the music I had written, that was performed and recorded, that lingers on my YouTube channel as nostalgia. I thought I would be writing music at this point in my life. But I haven’t written a new piece in a decade, just jazz improvisations.

Several old friends at the event asked warily if I was doing OK. I knew what they meant, and I said yes, my recovery is solid and I am doing fine.

As Kathy spoke I looked across the room and thought about what might have been, in politics but even more in music, but for addiction.

I also thought about a recent moment alone in the hospital with Ella Polite, my mother’s oldest and closest caregiver. She had suffered a massive stroke three weeks before, and I had been by the hospital several times. We stayed close after my mother died and she called me every week or so, just to make sure I was ok and “behaving yourself,” as she put it.

I told her again I loved her, just as my mother had. I told her I was behaving myself, and she didn’t have to worry about me any more.

I want to believe she heard me. She died the next morning.

What does this have to do with art?

It has to do with life, and art has everything to do with the flow and transformation and unexpected twists and, yes, the loses that make up every life.

It also has a lot to do with what’s been happening since I opened up a process of emotional discovery in the summer of 2019.

That July I shut down the verbal, intellectualizing part of my brain as I entered treatment again. I started making art as a way to express what had once come out in the music I could no longer write, and in the words that often explained everything but solved nothing.

I healed.

And, to my astonishment, the images kept coming, transforming, transcending buried trauma and failed expectations and revealing what was possible if I lived in the moment. I learned what was possible if I stayed present, not consumed by regret of the past nor fear of the future.

To my even greater astonishment, people responded to these messages from the subconscious. Somehow, they resonated.

It hasn’t stopped. My creative process has continued to evolve, as has the emotional process of healing and growth. And the images continue to resonate with others.

I don’t know what might have been. But I am grateful, every day, to be on this journey.

Chronologically, I am 70. But artistically, I like to think I am young, in artististic conversation with the young artists of today. Next month, I’ll write more about some contemporary  artists I particularly like.

Simply, I go wherever the process takes me. I can’t do anything else.

The new work continues to surprise me.