Paul Dresser, Nancy Clark and James Mellick; Greenville College, late 1960's
Paul Dresser, Nancy Clark and James Mellick; Greenville College, late 1960's
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Returning to an Old Friend
by James Mellick
I have recently rekindled an old friendship that I let slip away nearly thirty-two years ago. We have been together again for over a year now and I'm glad she is back in my life. As a young visual artist I was too busy with my profession and teaching to pay any attention to her. Next to my family, achieving success in my profession was everything. There was a time when thoughts about teaching and ideas for new sculpture were attached to the little red corpuscles running through my arteries. There was little time for other interests and I let music fall by the wayside once I entered graduate school and then forgot about her once I experienced success as a visual artist.
It is important for professional artists who are perfectionists to allow themselves to be an amateur at something. For me, renewing my relationship with music and songwriting is that something. When I taught as a full-time, non-tenured faculty in college, I had little time for the luxuries of other interests. My sense of well-being would rise and fall with how my job went that day. My identity as an associate professor was tied to my job. I know the pain when someone loses their identity along with their employment.
If I have one piece of advice for younger artists and faculty, it is to "get a life" by nurturing other interests than your own profession. Looking back, I realize that my happiest colleagues where those who, aside from having tenure, had other passions and distractions in their lives beside teaching their specialty. Somehow, I missed this bit of mentoring by the example of my graduate school faculty at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. The painter, Michael Smith played the banjo and was an avid fan and player of baseball. The printmaker, Robert Malone, was a concert pianist. Tenured colleagues of my own had such diverse interests as marathon bicycling, jazz, hunting and fishing and raising cows. One department chairperson liked (and could afford) haute cuisine, world travel and a dry martini every friday at 4 o'clock. If I had figured this out earlier in my life, I would have been less dedicated to my work. My sense of well-being would not have been so closely tied to the frustrations, mediocrity and apathy that I found in college teaching. If I had not had such a sense of urgency to get things accomplished , I could have enjoyed a fuller life. If I had diluted my professional zeal with other interests, I would have been less threatening to colleagues who were satisfied with the status quo.
I can not believe how much fuller my life has become since I turned 50. My new interests are not really something that can be put on a professional resume but they more truely reflect who I am as a person.