Is It A Hobby?

My long suffering wife, who (I believe) loves me as much as she can, said, "I think painting is a good hobby for you." As soon as I heard that word "hobby" it felt a little like I'd stepped on a shard of glass barefooted. Hobby? Is what I do a hobby?

Is what I do a hobby?

Does it matter? Why do I feel an aversion to the word?

The definition of a hobby is an activity or interest that is undertaken for pleasure or relaxation. The activity is done for pleasure and relaxation and not for financial gain. Obviously a hobby might produce something that can be sold, and money can accumulate, but the reason one engages in the hobby is not to earn a living, it is to enjoy living.

Often I tell people that when I paint I zone out, it is like medication, self-hypnotism, it creates in me a sort of Buddhist calm, and since I have been, for years depressed and stressed, it seems prudent for me to involve myself in some activity that clears my mind of distractions, and focuses me on the moment only. When I paint, I forget time. When I paint the television becomes a talking lamp, the coffee in my cup goes untouched and grows cold. I work a late shift so I set the alarm on my cell phone to go off at 1:45 pm. This reminds me to stop painting and get ready to go to work. Without the alarm I could easily be late to work. When I paint, time ceases to exist, or at least time ceases to matter.' When I paint what matters is the painting.

Sometimes friends will ask me to paint something particular. Often they want a portrait of their dog, or a likeness of their dead mother. I have stopped taking such commissions. I've done it in the past and sometimes I've been successful, and sometimes not. The thing is, if I take a commission then suddenly I have to paint something that pleases someone else, someone who likely has a preconceived idea of what they want. I have no problem having someone say, "I like that picture, how much would you take for it." The picture is done. If someone wants to buy something already done, something that appeals to them, then fine. At no point was that picture painted to please that buyer, it was painted because I wanted to paint it. If I have an order to fill then the benefits of painting is, for me, diminished.

Sometimes, once I have finished a painting, I'll look at it and decide it sucks like a vacuum cleaner. Because I am struggle financially, I will often decide to paint over the sucky picture with primer and try again. Why waste a canvas? Nevertheless, even when I paint a picture and feel my efforts have failed, I still benefited from the painting. I enjoy painting a bad picture as much as I enjoy painting a good picture. Of course I don't enjoy looking at a failed end product, the action of painting did not fail.

Again, this all sounds like what I do is a hobby. It sounds like I paint because it helps me, pleases me, relaxes me, and I don't do it to make money. So what's wrong with calling it a hobby?

I guess I have this assumption that something done for money is serious and something done for pleasure and relaxation is trivial. If what I do is considered a hobby by other people then they are not going to honor my sacrifice of time on the altar of hobby.

When I looked at the origins of the word Hobby I found that the roots of the word go way back and are linked to our childhood toy, the hobby horse. Actually the toy's name goes back even further, perhaps to medieval days when a small horse (13 to 14 hands which is about 52 to 56 inches, or 130 to 140 centimeters) was bred for soldiers called Hobelars. The HOBBY was the name given to these small skirmishing horse. Since that horse was small, it made since to call the child's toy horse, a Hobby Horse. The Hobby Horse could actually be ridden, and it was fun to ride, but it took you nowhere. In a similar way our hobbies are real activities, they are fun to do, but the fun, and the doing is the purpose of that activity.


Well, maybe the purpose of my painting is not getting rich and famous, but it is more than a hobby to me. I need another category. I need to find another term. There are, I guess, passive hobbies and obsessive hobbies. What I do matters to me, and people who care about me MUST honor my devotion to painting. If you want to have a relationship with me, then part of me is my need to paint every day. (I also write every day.)

Yes, I miss days sometimes. My son recently got his PHD at Princeton, and my wife and I flew up there and spent 4 days with him. I didn't paint. I did bring a sketch pad, and I did sketch when I had time, but I didn't paint. I will still go shopping with Kathie, and make trips to the grocery store. I still mow the grass. I am not demanding that ONLY my needs matter. While Kathie has a relationship with me, I also have a relationship with her. I honor what matters to her.

I just hate calling what I do a hobby. I've read that Vincent Van Gogh only sold one painting during his life time. Does that mean Van Gogh was just a hobbyist painter? Painting is part of who I am, and that means the value of painting is linked to my value as a human being.

I WISH I COULD DRAW LIKE THAT

Some people look at my doodles, or look at my paintings and I usually get the same comment: “I wish I could paint.” OR “I can’t even draw a straight line.” OR “I wish I had your talent.”

I usually reply in some way similar to this: “You not only could do the art work I do, but you could probably do it better than I do. All you need to do is do what I have done. I have drawn thousands of pictures. Most of the pictures I have drawn were on scraps of paper, or in the margins of workbooks, so I’m not claiming to have done thousands of finished, ready to be framed pictures. What I am saying is that I have sketched, doodled, and cartooned day after day for the past 60 years. I drew in school when I was supposed to be doing seat work. I drew in church as I endured two sermons on Sunday and one on Wednesday night. My parents thought drawing and painting were important so I was encouraged to draw and paint, supplies were made available to me, and while I didn’t call it practice, that is what it was. I practiced all the time.

A person who hasn’t drawn many pictures can’t expect to be as skilled as someone who has drawn 20, 000 pictures. But anyone who has drawn and painted as much as I have will be pretty good at it and lots of folks will be great at it.

What I think most people mean when they sigh and say they wish they could paint like I do, they mean that they wish they could just do what I do without ever having to do the practice. I wish I were thin without having to eat less. I wish I had muscles without having to lift weights.

Throughout history there have been these plumbs of artistic expression that seem to just happen. How can we explain that Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael all knew each other, were alive at about the same time, and about the same area on this earth? Or how about the Impressionists in France? Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Dagas Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gaugh and Lautrec all come on the scene at about the same period in history, in France, or they are drawn to France, and these guys knew each other. How can that be? What explains it?

Eric Hoffer writes some about this and in general he seems to think what is valued by society creates the talented. A kid that throws a ball well, in a society that honors sports, is likely to get encouragement to keep throwing that ball. A kid in Renaissance Italy might draw a picture on the side walk with a piece of chalk and the art lovers of their society will say, “Hey kid. That’s great. Draw some more.”

I have a good friend who argues with me and the example he uses to refute my view is singing. Some people just can’t carry a tune. Some people can take lessons, and practice and even love music, but they just can’t stay on tune. We all know people like that he says so clearly some people just get the gift of singing and some don’t.

It is a good point. I am not sure I agree, but I do recognize that the point is well made and not easily refuted.

Eric Hoffer said, "Where the development of talent is concerned, we are still at the food gathering stage." In other words, we may recognize talent, we might be able to go out and find talent and haul talent into the studio, but we have not yet learned how to grow talent. Our ability to plant the seeds of talent, to cultivate and nurture talent is just not something we as a society have learned do yet.

I guess the debate about art is similar to the debate about all human traits: is it nature or nurture, is it a gift, or a learned skill, is it etched on our DNA or is it learnable.

I want it to be learnable, because if it is a gift then I have it, or I don’t have it. It takes ME out of the equation. I want to believe that I can be an artist if I choose to be an artist. If YOU believe talent is a gift, and if YOU believe you didn’t get the gift then YOU will not try, and you will not develop the talent you admire.

Some of the April Paintings

I FEEL BETTER

I’ve lived with depression so long that I expect to be depressed. Depression has been the norm for me for the last 54 years. For me, not being depressed would be like rearranging the furniture in a blind man’s house. Everything in my life is where it has always been when I am depressed. I have actually started to fear that MAYBE depression was such a habit that I was keeping myself depressed because that was the only way I knew how to exist.

I have been BETTER for the past few years, because of cognitive behavioral therapy, but I was not depression free. It is like if depression had been a fever then I had a 104 degree fever for nearly 50 years, but over the past 4 years or so I’ve had a 100 degree temp. I have been better, but I still felt the presence of depression. If Depression were a color I was Navy Blue for 50 years, and sort of a bruised blue for the last 4 years. I continued to see my shrink every other week, because that activity enabled me to at least be a functioning depressant.

Something has changed. I’m not sure what changed, but there is no doubt that within me something has changed. I am different. I noted two things happened about the time I started feeling better. I started taking Deplin, and I wrote a description of what I thought a depression free life would be like.

First let me comment on the Deplin. What I understand is that one of the B vitamins needed by everyone is Folate. We get Folate from our diet, IF we obeyed mama and ate our green vegetables. Of course many of us do not eat enough green vegetables to ingest a therapeutic dose of Folate, so, to get this essential vitamin into our body without eating a pound of broccoli per meal, some of us take the man made form of Folate that comes in a little tablet called Folic Acid. Researchers found out that before our body benefits from this folic acid the vitamin must be broken down using a 4 step process.

Folate is chemically created as Folic Acid which breaks down into
Dihydrofolate, which then breaks down into
Tetrahydrofolate, and this is finally broken down into
L-Methylfolate.

The tablet Deplin is L Methylfolate.

The literature on Deplin claims that some people have a compromised ability to break down folic acid . Researchers further claim that about 70% of depressed people have this compromised ability to turn folic acid into L-Methylfolate. With Deplin, it doesn’t matter if the patient can or can’t bread down Folate, because when you ingest L-Methylfolate the body can use it immediately.

With Deplin not only do we benefit from ingesting this purest form of Folate, we also benefit from this L-Methylfolate because it is concentrated. Deplin makes a lot more of the useful supplement available to you. Remember, one 7.5mg Deplin tablet provides the bio-equivalent L-Methylfolate of 66 (800mcg) folic acid tablets.

I started taking Deplin about a month ago. My therapist added Deplin to the antidepressant cocktail I’ve been taking for several; years.

When the Deplin was suggested to me, and when I learned that it was a form of vitamin supplement, I was polite and said I’d try it, but in my mind I expected nothing to happen. Deplin is a purified vitamin! For most of my life I have considered vitamins as a way to produce very expensive brightly colored urine.

Remember all the wild claims made for ingesting mega doses of vitamin C, back in the day?. I remember hearing that if you took mega doses of vitamin C you could cure cancer and improve your ability to play the piano. That seemed crazy to me. After a month, something changed in me. I've been depressed for most of my life, around 55 years or so, and I have been taking meds and using talk therapy since 1980, and I figured I would live depressed until I died depressed. I did not believe anything was going to fix me. Something has happened after being a month on Deplin. I would not say I am giddy, I do not feel I have my life under control, but I am no longer worried, fearful, hopeless. I still have all the problems I've always had, including a traumatic childhood, but now I just feel I can cope. I may not know how I'm going to cope, but I sense that I will be able to cope. This change in me is not a thought, it is a feeling, but it is just barely a feeling. It is more like an unpleasant feeling gradually faded away, and I am just now noticing that it is gone. At first I thought it was a fluke. I thought, well, even a guy like me can have a good day once in a while. But one OK day followed the next OK day. I've been waiting for that other sad shoe to drop, I’ve been waiting for my sole to fall and it just hasn’t happened. . . repeatedly. This is the closest I have ever been to feeling as if I had an effective treatment for depression. Depression is like diabetes for me, you have it for the rest of your life, but with the right diet and meds you can live almost as if you didn't have it. Deplin just may be the I'm OK drug that brings my chronic depression under control.

No one expected this less than me. I am not happy. I am not joyful. I am not problem free. My life is still as flawed as the world around me. What is missing is worry, dread, and hopelessness. I don’t feel giddy, I’m not smiling all the time. The change is that I feel OK about being alive. I feel like I can cope with whatever happens next.

Have I just, finally fixed my thinking patterns? I don’t think it is that. I’m leaning toward the years of cognitive behavioral therapy, my psychotropic cocktail and the booster effects of Deplin. Obviously this is anecdotal evidence, and my experience is not a scientific conclusion. For the world of science the study must continue, but for me, well, all I can say is, I feel better.