“Grasses”: Jenny Wilson, acrylic on canvas
Last July I attended a concert at the Yellow Barn Studio featuring Jenny Wilson—a jazz musician and contemporary abstract painter living in Chevy Chase, Maryland. I’d had a complicated summer navigating matters of work, home, and heart, and was looking for a little respite.
It was a warm day, not too hot—surprising for July in the Mid-Atlantic. Arriving late, I settled into a back row seat with a full view of Jenny on the keyboard and her fellow musicians on bass and percussion. Jenny’s abstract paintings hung on all four walls of the gallery. Across the room an open window offered a gentle breeze and a partial view of distant, swaying trees.
It didn’t take long (one song, in fact) for these elements—music and art, leaves and branches—to converge into one continuous ribbon of sound, sight, and texture. For an hour, I let go of my churning mind, always grasping and defining, and allowed Jenny’s jazz notes and imaginative paintings work their magic. Afterward, I sought Jenny out to thank her for the concert, and to share how I thought her music “sounded like her paintings” and vice-verse—an awkward attempt to describe the ineffable.
I’m hardly the first to fall under the spell of a hybrid music and art experience. The Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s understood the potent pairing of bold lines and planes of color with a mellow keyboard, deep bass, and brushed cymbals soft as dove wings. On the way home from the concert, I thought about how different art forms complement, harmonize, and uplift one another: jazz and abstract expressionism, sculpture and landscape gardening, calligraphy and ballet (more on the latter, in another essay).
My thoughts extended to other pairings that contribute not just to creativity, but contentment and overall human flourishing. For example, one friend of mine combines his love for river kayaking with nature photography. Another friend moves seamlessly among fiction, theater, and songwriting about mythology and feminine identity; while yet another hosts an enduring podcast that marries his humor and knack for storytelling with his interest in climate science. When we approach our passions and interests through an expansive lens, it expands our universe.
Human flourishing, or what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, is what transpires when the pursuit of excellence is aligned with a higher or common good. I’ve written about eudaemonia before. I believe in its noble ideal and love the syllabic sound of the word … eu-dai-mo-nia. It calls to mind a rolling river, a life of composed of complementary currents. Aristotle considered eudaimonia one of the building blocks of a healthy, civic society.
This particular orientation is not quick to take hold. In younger years, we view our lives through the singular, all-consuming lenses of career, marriage, and family. It can take time to identify and take seriously our other interests, let alone try to thread a needle between them. For the longest time, my enthusiasm for creative writing, brushpainting, botanicals, and political philosophy felt disparate, disjointed, and unconnected. Only recently, with the benefit of time and distance, have I begun to see how well these things complement and enhance one another. When I dwell in one arena, it opens a portal to another arena.
For example: the principles of brush-painting and Ikebana (Japanese flower arranging) draw upon the Taoist philosophy of ying-yang—the interdependent balance between darkness and light, passive and active, female and male. These attributes, the very same that produce harmonious paintings and floral arrangements, are also integral to balanced, equanimous living.
I met up Jenny again last autumn, when I visited her home studio to buy one of the paintings from her summer show. She called it, quite simply, ‘Grasses,’ although the title belies the rather complex idea of an insect’s eye-view staring up into long blades of wild grass. ‘Grasses’ hangs in my dining room, where it reminds me of how it feels when we learn to combine the things we love — when sound, sight, and texture complement one another—an insect’s own version of jazz and art on summer day.