Welcome to Ordinary Objects
Making things in the middle of life.
Welcome to Ordinary Objects, a newsletter about art in midlife. Do you ever feel the compulsion to make things but lack direction, free time, or guts? Do you fantasize about going to art school in your forties (or fifties), or scribble down notes for a novel that you’ll get to eventually? Do you simply yearn for a more artful life? This is for you.
Midlife means different things to different people, but let’s consider it the period between our mid-thirties to sixty-ish when we are consumed by domesticity, work, and intergenerational care-taking. OO will explore how we tend to abandon our creative impulses during this critical window—right when they’re most available to us, when we finally have something to say. Through essays, interviews, and occasional reporting, I will acknowledge how exceptionally difficult art-making is during this phase of life and moment in time, and urge us all to do it anyway.
The tone here will be practical and unholy. I’ll explore what it means to see, make, and engage with art for people who are pressed for time and don’t know where to begin. I’ll talk to artists who bloomed late, parents who create after the kids go down, and the gallerists, studios, and curators who’ve worked with them. Together, we’ll confront the myths that the arts are reserved for the young and prodigious, or that they need to make you rich or famous in order to “count.”
If you take only one thing away from this, let it be the conviction that that is bullshit.
I’ll start with art forms that tend to be taught and shown—painting, drawing, watercolor, writing—and will initially focus on stuff I’m personally drawn to. But creativity is vast, the work will get weirder, and before long, I’m sure musicians, playwrights, and chefs will get in the mix. To me, art is anything you make with your hands and attention that isn’t purely functional. The only rule is it cannot be optimized.
What right do I have to write about any of this? Not much! I don’t have paintings in a gallery or an MFA. But I do have a background in arts reporting for national magazines and newspapers; I know how to ask good questions and carve out a story. More importantly, I’m one of you—a busy parent with a day job that is stimulating but not necessarily creative, in that I don’t spend my days mixing paint, styling photo shoots, or agonizing over perfect sentences. Those careers are increasingly rare, especially if you separate art-making from brand storytelling. But that doesn’t change our internal makeup; we still feel pulled toward artistic expression. For many of us, the urge only gets louder with age. Some of us just needed time to find our voice.
There are many reasons I decided to start this newsletter. For one, making things in midlife is indisputably hard. We’re too busy, too self-conscious, too in our own heads, convinced that if it can’t be done perfectly, it isn’t worth doing at all. We tell ourselves that art only matters if someone wants to pay for it, and that if we haven’t “made it” by 35 or 40, the ship has sailed. All of it is nonsense, but it’s handy when we’re looking for excuses not to participate. We need equal or greater forces nudging us in the other direction.
I also wanted an excuse to write. It’s been more than a decade since I moved from journalism to tech, and I’ve felt those muscles begin to atrophy. That makes me sad. Writing is my first love. When I ran the idea for this newsletter past a friend and fellow tech editor, she offered some softly radical advice: “If you can, do it for yourself.”
More than anything, I want to talk about art in a way that has less to do with the market and more to do with everyday human life. We’ve gotten used to treating it like a luxury or diversion, but it remains one of the surest ways to stay awake to the world. By the time we enter midlife, we’ve decided how it is and what things mean. Art is one of the few forces that can actually undo all that.
Honestly, the more I learn about artists in this phase of life, the more I’m convinced we’ve gotten creativity all wrong. Prodigies are cool, but have you ever seen what Alice Neel painted as a stay-at-home mom in her Harlem apartment? Neel embraced motherhood and midlife as material, allowing her identity to continue unfolding in unexpected directions. Her portraits hum with life experience; they remind us that age sharpens certain things.
The trick, I think, is trusting our instincts while shedding our ego. Can we give ourselves permission to be beginners again? Are we willing to be bad? Children hurl themselves at the blank page, letting their imaginations take shape uninhibited. I’ve been wondering what it would take to get back there, and what I might see that I’ve been missing.
Still life paintings—the genre of bowls, fruit, and flowers, the quiet stuff of domestic life—are never about the objects themselves. They’re about attention, about looking closely at what’s already in front of you and seeing something new. That’s the idea here, too. Our lives are full of material. Our hands still work. The ordinary objects of these demanding days—the kitchen table, the hour after the kids are asleep—are full of promise and beauty.
So happy this now exists!
YES I AM SO IN