It was good to see James this morning after a day of absence. I walked into his room, opened the blinds to let some sunshine in, and squeezed his hand. He was a little slow in coming around so I immediately set up the music and played songs from John Lennon's Imagine album. That definitely brought him around.  When we were teenagers, James was obsessed with John Lennon (he had a pair of those circle sunglasses).  We jokingly thought of ourselves as John and Yoko.

Fast forward to just a few years ago, we had a rather famous avant-garde musician living on the first floor of our apartment building (who has since passed away and for respect to his widow, I will leave him unnamed).  My mother was visiting us for the holidays as it was the first Christmas without my father.  Our second floor neighbors, the amazing talented family (not related to David Sedaris!) of Juliette Mapp, Dan Kaufman and their adorable son Luca, were somewhat new to the building and aware of the historical significance of the first floor musician.  This is a long in the tooth set-up.  Dan saw my mother in the hallway, briefly, and thought she was Yoko visiting the avant-garde first floor musician. This mistaken identity made us terribly happy and hatching plans to take my mother around NYC dressed as Yoko!

James has an additional hiccup in his brain which is a defect on the temporal bone of his skull.  The doctors noticed it on this morning's CT scan.  The result of this defect is the leaking of cerebral spinal fluid which accounts for the low pressure measurements in his brain.  This may seem a little complicated to understand so I will attempt to simplify it here. The defect may have been present previously and may be the way in which the bacteria entered James's brain or it may be a kind of side-effect from the surgery.  Please do not let this revelation concern you. It does not change anything regarding his recovery. If anything, the discovery shines light on some of the questions the NICU team were having on the up and down of James's healing process. James is a complicated case and I have great respect for the various teams that gather together to hash out the possibilities for his stabilization.

I wanted to share with you the realization by James that he would be an artist. On one of the first few days of my time in the NICU, a social worker came to visit me. She wanted to start a file on James to assist me, when the time comes, with the various steps for long term rehabilitation.  Her list of questions were the usual, age, occupation, address, and then, she said, "Hobbies?"  I laughed.  I told her, "His entire life is a hobby, he's an artist."

James attempted--to reassure his parents that he would not be penniless--to be an art history major with a minor in business as an undergrad.  After one painful accounting class, he realized it was an absurd notion, and switched to a double major of art history and art practice.  He had a life changing experience in a performance art class taught by the artist Jim Melchert. Up to that point, I do not think James really contemplated what it was to be an artist. I think he had an idea about painting from art history but not what it meant for him, personally.  Here's a link to a brief moment of Jim Melchert talking about his process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMvFX9FNTi0.

Being an artist is not a regular job. I had a friend tell me that I overly romanticized artists and my response was, well, you go live with one and get back to me.  James was making art all the time.  There was no real delineation from art and life.  He decided to attend graduate school almost immediately because it was a way to push his painting further and provide him with the space and time in which to concentrate on art making--it was not a career move.  It was a different art world culture at that time.  One of the first paintings he did in graduate school was a terrible, horrible portrait of an alien. You know the type--oval head, big eyes, green skin. He showed it to me in his studio.  It was truly bad.  We laughed about it even then.  I told him, "Do not show this to anyone. You did it, it's meaningful, now move on."  He refused. He wanted to show it to his painting advisor--he had no shame!  All of this was part of his pathway to finding himself as an artist.

He was chosen as one of three graduate students to participate in the Tyler/Temple University program in Rome.  He taught undergraduate students to sketch Roman ruins although, some of his historical facts were slightly off (a student once called him on it, reading from a Rome guidebook!).  It was a banquet of delights for James as a painter and he gorged himself. Baroque architecture!  Ducking in to see a Carvaggio on the way home from painting in his studio! Riding his bike through what we called Bernini's arms at the Vatican! It was beyond sublime. He discovered scale in Rome and that he was an artist, for life.  His teacher, Stanley Whitney, called him out from the very beginning. They had a studio visit together and Stan used the word "hobbyist" as a means to push James further.  It infuriated him. I recall James arriving home that day and spitting out that word, "A damn hobbyist!"

The process never pauses. James owes so much of his current work to his students at the 92nd Street Y.  He started teaching there, by the seat of his pants. He had some teaching experience but worried about how to provide exact painting technique to students or even, grasp how to analyze his own painting process and skills to give to others.  His students' passion to learn and desire to create truly fueled James to think about his own use and understanding of color, light, and paint.  He was energized.  He has brought home student paintings to frame and has shown them, excitedly, to me.  He would say, "Isn't this great, look, look a this!"  He wanted to give what he knew as an artist to those that might be thinking of painting as a craft and push them further to have a window into being artists, each and every one.  You may call them hobbyists but we know, it's just a method to make everyone dig deeper, push further, and grasp life through creation.

Go out and create today, you world of hobbyists!