“The real artist’s work is a surprise to himself.” 
― Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

My wife Nancy and I have taken this period of viral siege as a gift. The quiet solitude moves us towards the meditative, focusing on the now, and impermanence. And it has nudged creativity. 

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been shooting photos of some of Nancy’s art. She thrives on creativity and directs herself to new outer limits. She has coached and led workshops on the subject. I have grown used to her occasional need to rise from the bed at 2 a.m. and carry an idea down to her work area. 

Her creativity has given us the most artsy mailbox on our dead end road. And I have never seen a steering wheel and dashboard of a car that was artistically painted until shortly after I married Nancy and she went at our Honda Civic like an unleashed Salvador Dali.

She has written and performed three one-woman shows. Each of them, The Truth about Women and Horses, When God was Fun, and Instruments of Bliss were very well received by audiences that numbered in the thousands.

And she has played major roles in several Festival Theater productions, including Ma Joad in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Linda Lohman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

After writing the book, Sensuous Living, she was flown to New York City for a guest appearance on the Sally Jesse Rapheal show. And last summer she wrote an illustrated a one-of-a-kind book for our granddaughter called Eleanor Visits the Yukon.

She has written music that she can sing and accompany herself on her guitar, mandolin, ukulele or fiddle. As I write this she is in the adjacent room plucking and strumming clear-noted, old tunes on her mandolin. 

Her creative courage even had her once give a solo original dance performance at St. Catherine’s University in St. Paul, MN.

So it should come as no surprise that when an appeal came to sew masks for medical personnel Nancy would turn a humane endeavor into an art project. 

As a person who loves to make art, she can never have too much art material. I sometimes accuse her of hoarding but I need to be careful because I have my own secret stashes of potential. 

It was easy for her to come up with the necessary mask material and the accompanying ties and elastic loops.

Before donating the masks, she merged all of them into a timely skirt and top, a wearable artwork entitled “Mask Skirt.”


Nancy is an organized thinker. Every day I can find a scrap of envelope or a piece of blank paper with a list of chores she plans on tending that day. Success comes in the elation of crossing off tasks from such a list. 

Rather than tossing the list into the fire or the recycle box, she saves it. I had no idea that she was secreting hundreds of these archival scraps of her history into a file. From this art material was born “Busy Skirt.”

The pleated skirt is made of accordion-folded to-do lists. The brilliance in the outfit was the faux blouse and collar made from lists. For the photo she stood in front of a wall of lists that spilled out under her feet. 

She is currently working on her third skirt and top, entitled “Handsy.” It is made up of an old leather bag fringed in our worn out work gloves supplemented with orphaned ones found during bike rides along the shoulder of roads. 

Women continue to be treated like objects and subjected to wolf whistles, calls and worse. The gloves symbolize men’s claiming of women’s bodies.

Like all art, her skirts are not for use but rather to provoke. One of the functions of art is to move the viewer to change for a safer and more sustainable society. 

So the creative spirit has been haunting our Basecamp. In turn, our seemingly cluttered home easily morphs into a center of creativity where we find ourselves wedded to wonder.   

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