My undergraduate degree was in electrical engineering. I really had no desire to study engineering. But it was a field that my “advisors” seem to have thought was a good field to get into. It was 1965 and the thinking was that with an engineering degree I could get a “good” job. I suppose I could have but on the day that I was scheduled to take an exam to get certified – and thus be able to actually get a job in engineering, I decided instead to blow off the exam and sit in the sun. Three hours of pleasure instead of three hours of suffering. I have always thought that that was one of my better decisions. Engineering wasn’t for me.

Actually, it wasn’t just engineering that I decided wasn’t for me. I had been the first in my family to graduate from college and up until that point just about everything that I did, by way of schooling and preparation for a career, had been done to please someone else. So when I was 21, I said to myself, “That’s it. I met my obligation. I’m now going to do what I like.”

A lot was going on in 1965: war, rebellion, the counter-culture, new ways of thinking and living. I was fascinated by what was going on around me but I felt like I was on the outside looking in. And I wanted to know more or maybe the correct way of stating this is that I wanted to be more – live more, discover more. So I decided to go to grad school in political science. I could have made a better choice but it was the choice I made and that is where I began my own little personal journey to explore the world around me.

My plan didn’t unfold as neatly as I had expected. Uncle Sam saw to that. But eventually, after four years in the military, I finally was able to do nothing but take a variety of interesting classes. Moreover, I was beginning to take painting seriously, too. So while I was immersed in all sorts of head-spinning academic courses, I was also getting steady exposure to my art teacher who seemed to never let go of the notion that if you want to make art, you first have to get a thrill. I loved the feeling of growing, of becoming acquainted with new ways of looking at things. I distinctly remember thinking – practically every few months – “Gee, I can’t believe I used to think that way.”

Now, part of what I was learning, or at least what I came to believe, was that if you wanted to study such things as people or society or history, you couldn’t do it in the same way that you might study electrons or rocks or bridges for the simple reason that people think about themselves – unlike electrons – and in so doing, they change. Yet, there are areas of political science – statistical analysis, for example, where that is all you do; you use science to study people. Not only did I think this was dumb, I thought such areas of study were boring. They didn’t seem to encourage reflection, growth, expansion, new ideas, or ways of being in the world. I will never forget one day when I asked a friend of mine, why on God’s green earth did he decide to focus his studies on statistical analysis, that is, to make a career of it. His answer stunned me: “That’s where the jobs are.” Wow, I thought. For me, that would be like snuffing out my newly found freedom.

Enter Lucian Freud, the great painter and grandson of Sigmund who died recently: I was reading an obituary (by Jeffrey St. Clair) of Freud when the following paragraph jumped out at me:

But from the beginning, he cast his die with the figurative painters and against the mainstream of the abstractionists. It was a risky move and perhaps he wasn’t all that confident about it. Even today there are those who call Freud hopelessly out of date. You can hear the chiding: Too serious. Not ironic.

A risky move? Are you kidding? If he had chosen, instead, to fit into the career-making currents of expert opinion – that is, if he consciously tried to be less serious or more ironic to give his career a boost, that would have been really risky for he would have been risking his life. Pablo Casals noted that to retire is to begin to die. Okay, fine. But to launch off into a career just because it more than pays the bills or because it puts your name up in lights is a Faustian bargain otherwise known as suicide.

Joseph Campbell, who studied the world’s mythologies, helps to illuminate this point:

…each incarnation, you might say, has a potentiality, and the mission of life is to live that potentiality. How do you do it?  My answer is, “Follow your bliss.” There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m well aware that many, if not most of us, do not have a lot of options when it comes time to put food on the table. I’m simply talking about guideposts. For example, with regard to painting: we could talk about line and color and technique and material and “how-to” for a long time. But if we are not fully free to be who we are, what’s the point? I find it both amazing and depressing that in all the books I’ve read on Impressionism, the central focus is the painting. Often there is a fuss made because some scholar has come up with a new scientific way of peering into the canvas with a new microscope or some electromagnetic device. This is like looking through binoculars from the wrong end. It’s not about the blankety-blank painting. It’s about the freedom the Impressionists carved out of their received institutions. That’s what we should be exploring. That was the scandal in their day: their disobedience, their wish to be free to be who they were and their resolve to follow their bliss. That’s their accomplishment, their contribution and that’s what they have to teach us.