Art is Breathing

Today is not an easy day for my community as we are celebrating the life of our dear friend and super-talented artist Irina Litinsky. I would not send a newsletter on days like these if I could avoid it, however as an avid reader of this newsletter she would ask that the show go on and never miss a beat.

I profiled Irina in this edition, but with some reflection on the interview that I conducted with her while she was battling cancer, I feel like I understood what she landed on in her last years.

While she loved to paint, some circumstances in her life prior to her diagnosis pushed her towards using the camera instead. Using a simple iPhone, she pointed it at objects you wouldn’t think to point it at, garbage dumpsters, ruined signage and similar forms of chaos, and the result was stunning as profiled through hundreds of pieces on her instagram.

The lesson here is that making art is a form of breathing, and the artist who is stuck is not living. Life situations catch up with us and give us blockages: Depressing jobs, dysfunctional relationships, physical injury and more. But the job of the artist is reframe the game so that they can continue to work on their terms and keep the flow of inspiration going.

Shifting mediums and combining with a previous body of work, I feel like Irina had this game of creativity licked, fair and square.

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If you don’t make art it doesn’t matter because this applies to everything in life. If you stopped reading books then maybe you can try a new genre. If one sport is not sustainable any more, try pickleball. If pickleball doesn’t work out there’s always walking for one hour a day.

While saying goodbye to friends is difficult beyond words, everyone teaches us amazing lessons as Irina taught me. While I often dread sending newsletters and posting online, I do it as a way of passing on what I’m learning.

Irina also enjoyed listening to the late Alan Watts, and he is the perfect example of this as it was a fairly new thing to be recording and broadcasting what I would call psychedelic lectures in his era.

And here we are, in 2023, you can listen to Watts’ work on YouTube or his podcast, and his messages on the monotony of traditional work and the taboo downsides about organized religion and organizations in general will be just as relevant today as it was when he recorded them.

Do things your way. Work on things that resonate with you, and work to drop the things that simply aren’t working at all. Life is a delicate balance of navigating all these forces. All we can do is enjoy the ride through the good and the bad. Every day is a new chance to work on enjoying the ride and leaving this place better off than how we found it.

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I enjoyed this video profiling ecologist Stephan Harding. Well worth the ten-minute watch.

Thanks and see you next week…

Elliott