After

To me, retirement in the modern era, is a compromise between the career you leave behind and the pursuit of meaningfulness to fill one’s days.

And that, for me, is what makes Anna Mary “Grandma” Moses, an incredible story. Born in 1860, Grandma Moses didn’t begin to paint until 1938, when she reached the age of 78. (read her story on her Wikipedia page here).

When I was in junior high school, which at that time encompassed 6th, 7th, and 8th grade, our school’s art teacher would hold after school oil painting lessons. I remember being one of the students who participated in what I recall as weekly classes where we’d paint using tools I had never heard of before. Things like palette knives, colors such as alizarin crimson or yellow ochre - they were the ingredients of this magical experience. The first larger format painting I remember was of a Bird of Paradise plant painted on heavy cardboard; that painting is of course, long relegated to an incinerator.

After I retired, I made attempts to keep my former career - education - active. I was a flawed, but fairly adequate educator, a profession that was a second career for me. But when that career ended, there was a definite period of mourning followed by attempts to put my 30 years of knowledge and experience to use in a new way. Eventually though, I noticed that the profession was so changed, evolving from what I had known it to be to something different, and at times, unrecognizable to me.

I have been a problem solver for as long as I can remember. In teaching, when one strategem didn’t work, there were others to be tried. And so it has been with my own retirement. I needed to find a pursuit outside of education that would provide some sense of accomplishment, and this brings me back to Grandma Moses, my junior high art teacher, a long-ago foray into creating, and the present day.

In creating my own art, mainly botanical and mostly for personal notes and cards, I am exercising the less analytical parts of my brain that I honed during my career as an educator. I’ve found a pathway away from what I was to what I am becoming.

Choosing to learn watercolor techniques and trying to develop my own forms and design is to reach for something that is beyond where I am at this moment, but possible to attain sometime in the future. It makes me curious in the same manner that finding a pedagogy or teaching strategy used to when I was an educator.

The trait I admire in the story of Grandma Moses and her painting, is not necessarily her accomplishment in the art world. It is that, at age 78, she found a meaningful way to engage.