As the only artist on the museum’s inaugural blog team, I’m sure the folks at the Weisman were hoping I’d write a bit more about art. However, my allotted blog-time encompassed the ground-breaking 2008 election, the national economic melt-down, the Franken-Coleman senate recount, and the annual bitter-sweetness of the holiday season. My heart was in the street, not the studio.

What’s happening now in our country and communities is a paradigm shift of monumental proportions. This shift will bring changes and challenges that require our care and attention. No armchair quarterbacking. We’ve got to get in the game. Which underscores the premise I’d planned to make when I accepted this blogging gig last summer: that the personal is political, and that life – the personal – can be a work of art when approached with intention and creativity.

Though I am primarily an interdisciplinary and public artist, I also paint. Painting in the studio is, for me, a form of visual journaling and highly meditative. For ten years I have worked on various bodies of work but most of my paintings share one thing in common: the ongoing study of the horizon line as visual metaphor.

Night Seeds, Camille J. Gage, 2003

Readers of my earlier posts know that I lost my mother unexpectedly 27 years ago. This early loss inspired an ongoing interest in the dualities that form the core of our existence: life and death, day and night, good and evil, darkness and light. It is the tension, the shimmering place where these realities intersect, that compels me. Such sweet mystery!

The Uruguayan writer and social philosopher, Eduardo Galeano, once commented that art-making is our attempt to make sense of the inevitability of death and that its pursuit must never be reduced to a specialized practice exercised only by a handful of ‘experts.’ Like Thoreau, Galeano believed that we all have the ability – and perhaps even the responsibility – to make art of our very lives. It’s a utopian vision, but then what IS so funny ‘bout peace, love and understanding?

“Utopia lies at the horizon.
When I draw nearer by two steps,
it retreats two steps.
If I proceed ten steps forward, it
swiftly slips ten steps ahead.
No matter how far I go, I can never reach it.
What, then, is the purpose of utopia?
It is to cause us to advance.�

Eduardo Galeano

Happy new year to all,
Camille

Its midnight, the house is silent, and I’m thinking about that weightless place between joy and melancholy. The holidays always do this to me.

I’ll admit I cried three times in the last 24 hours. Once for close friends who are struggling; once for my mom, who died 27 years ago and who I still miss every day; and once at the Pantages Theater during the musical play, All is Calm, about the World War I Christmas Truce of 1914.

All is Calm chronicles an event which took place on the battlefield in Germany on Christmas Eve, 1914. In the dark of night, under a star-filled sky, a German soldier laid down his arms, walked out of his trench and sang Silent Night in the so-called No Man’s Land between the British and German encampments. Following his soulful lead soldiers on both sides laid down their weapons for the night, sang together, exchanged modest gifts and helped to bury each other’s dead. It was this last that brought on the tears. I instantly thought of the U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Though their in-country experience bears little resemblance to the trench warfare of the past, they still suffer the sight of wounded comrades and mourn their dead. Their sacrifice is enormous.

Untitled, 2007, from the series, War, Redacted, by Camille J. Gage

Loss occurs every day and everywhere, not just on the battlefield. Over the past year I’ve watched friends and family struggle to cope with life’s challenges: serious health problems, a child’s debilitating drug addiction, financial insecurity, job loss, and the death of partners and aging parents – of heart disease, cancer and suicide.

Why do we so often feel stranded in our sorrow and alone in our grief? The presence of loss and experience of pain, while intensely personal, is also extraordinarily common. It’s the tie that binds us but is often buried beneath a silent and soul-stifling stoicism.

The Christmas Truce of 1914 brought to mind a passage from Henry David Thoreau’s book, Walden. Thoreau wrote, “It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look…To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.�

This holiday I will aim to channel the artistry of that German soldier, who walked on to the battlefield and sang Silent Night – who was willing to be shot at, to die – to bear witness to our shared humanity and yearning for connection.

For everyone who has lost a loved one – and that is most of us – the holidays are a bittersweet time. May we find the strength to abandon our trenches and sing together to the stars.

For Juliet

Last week I read about a professor who is researching the healing power of thankfulness. In his study veterans suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder are keeping gratitude journals, a list of the everyday things they are thankful for. So far the veterans report this exercise has allowed them to experience a greater sense of overall wellbeing.* It’s amazing such a modest act can help to antidote the nightmares of war.

I’ve kept such a journal for about five years. It’s a habit I adopted after learning of an earlier study wherein people who regularly recorded the things they were thankful for slept longer, exercised more frequently, and had fewer health complaints**. What a payoff! The study’s subjects were both healthier and happier for simply taking a few moments each week to be consciously grateful.

These little piggies made my gratitude journal this year.

Modest as my efforts are – usually just a few lines each week – I do believe it makes a difference. My micro-journaling creates a reflective moment, a meditation if you will, on the positive aspects of my life. Powerful stuff in a world where we tend toward the restless and acquisitive; toward a sense of never having enough; to wanting more, more, more.

Ironic, isn’t it, and painfully so, that the biggest shopping day of the year follows Thanksgiving.

As the winter holidays approach and 2008 winds to an end I plan to reflect and record thanks in my journal – and to spend some serious face time with the wonderful people who inhabit its pages and enliven my life.

* Research being conducted by Todd Kashdan, associate professor of psychology at George Mason University in Virginia. Information taken from the article, Give Thanks, in the December 2008 issue of Yoga Journal.

**Study conducted in 2003 by psychiatry professor Robert Emmons of the University of California, Davis.