“How old are you?” This is the question that everyone asks best-selling historian Nell Painter when she returns to school at age 64. She retires from teaching at Princeton and pursues her lifelong dream of becoming an artist. Not a dabbler, not a retiree taking a few classes, but a “serious artist.” Art may be all about seeing, but artists are about being seen. Painter doesn’t just want to paint; she wants to get her MFA and be seen as a professional artist. Criticism and judgement are at the heart of art school, and she kind of craves them.
Ambition is not a bad thing. Painter leaves behind the certain ground of academics and takes on the challenge of a field in which she’s an amateur. She’s used to things not being easy – she’s a black woman born in the 1940s – but art school is hard in a way that disciplined work can’t overcome. The art world is young and spontaneous and in the now, and Painter is none of those things. Her experience, discipline, and academic excellence are all wrong for art school, and her “twentieth century eyes” see appropriation as plagiarism. Among the twentysomethings in class, she says, her gender and race “seemed almost inconsequential as my essence shriveled to my age.” Serious, smart, and successful, she is shocked by the experience of being seen and dismissed as an old woman.
But what an old woman she is! Funny, bright, and incredibly hardworking. This is a memoir, and she gets personal, chronicling her family history, but always coming back to art, which she has loved since childhood. Painter writes beautifully of beauty, and of the artifice of the art world, the deliberate cultivation of an artist’s identity while trying to say something real through art. She admits to being mortified when Google lets the world knows that she turned 70. (She’s not mortified by turning 70 but by being seen as undeniably 70.) But she accepts it and, with nowhere else to go, she moves forward in great strides. The book depicts many of her paintings and captures her love of art, the sheer pleasure of it. “Art stopped time,” she says.
Aging drives you toward comfort, and Painter works hard to stay uncomfortable. That’s a true artist.
My most recent story in The Fiddlehead is about aging, and art, and a powerful artist whose teachings don’t belong in school. I’m not as old as Nell Painter, and I’m nowhere near as bright and hardworking – I’m taking a Domestika course at a leisurely pace – but I’ve felt her shock in discovering that the world sees you as old. I’ve come to like the invisibility – you can do almost anything and no one will even notice.
— Catherine Austen writes from Gatineau, Quebec. Her books have won the Canadian Library Association Young Adult Book Award and the Quebec Writers’ Federation Prize for Children’s Literature. Her stories have appeared in The New Quarterly, The Humber Literary Review, The Fiddlehead, and many other journals. Learn more at catherineausten.com.
You can find Catherine Austen' story "Everything Hangs by a Thread" in Issue 301 Autumn 2024. Order the issue now:
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