The New York Times recently missed an opportunity to talk about bringing your whole self to work, as writer Michael R. Gordon wrote a piece about the work life of David Richardson, yet didn’t challenge the subject’s assertions that his two professions are mutually exclusive. Here’s the story.
Lt. Col. David Richardson in his own words is a “painter who fights.” He’s an artist showing his colorful Expressionist paintings in a Georgetown gallery through the end of January, and in February he’ll be deployed to work with Afghan security forces. Unfortunately, he doesn’t view his disparate occupations–artist and Marine–as integrable, even though they’re both extensions of himself.
Directly from “Faithful to Two Worlds: The Marines and the Artistic Life”:
Colonel Richardson does acknowledge the considerable influence of his tours of duty in Asia on his painting. During a tour in South Korea, for example, he had small canvases made for him by a local carpenter, hauled them back to his studio on his bicycle, painted symbols on the individual squares and then clamped them together to form larger works, which comprise part of his “R Series” on display in Washington DC. The faint arrows, similar to the directional markings on a tactical map, are one of the rare carry-overs from his military world.
Interestingly, his mother is an artist who paints landscapes and flowers, and his father had been a Navy diver in World War II.
Now, the catalog for the show mentions his travels to Japan and Korea, but at his request never suggests that his military service took him there. As well, during the long lulls between patrols when he and his Marines were holed up with Iraqi troops in a dilapidated soap factory in Fallujah, he never hinted that he had a passion for art.
By his own account he has long led a double existence. “It’s been pretty compartmentalized,” he said about his two lives.” “My father taught me to talk the talk. You don’t talk about art with the Marines, and you don’t talk about the Marines with artists.”
So it sure would be tidy to blame his father for limiting his worldview. Yet as an adult, he bears some responsibility to challenge what he’s been taught. At the same time, his gestalt smacks of the restrictions imposed by “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
Clearly, these two distinct areas of work are related — within Colonel Richardson. Yet it’s difficult for him to work openly as a Marine and a painter. While we acknowledge that the stress of war impacts each troops’ state of mind in complicated ways, we have a hypothesis that if Col. Richardson were to come out in both worlds, his openness and mindfulness would make him a better artist and a better Marine.
Do you lead two or more distinct professional lives? What are the challenges you face in integrating them?
Image via
I have long felt that sharing stories like these is of primary importance in forwarding human tolerance and understanding. While your post largely keys in on how the Lieutenant Colonel’s “two worlds” have a “never the twain shall meet” quality, I find it of near equal importance to point out that it would seem Richardson is good at both jobs. We, as a culture, advance our thinking beyond pat judgments and prejudices largely pursuant to the efforts of those from “another side of life” who’ve challenged our thinking simply by impressing us. We like when people do what they do, well. Dorothy Dandridge, for instance, helped show our then legally segregated culture what an African-American woman could accomplish in a feature film lead role. It’s doubtful she might have been able to pull that off had she been half the performer that she was. Tiger Woods, Martina Navratilova, Barrack Obama, Sally Ride, the 1980 American Olympic Hockey Team, FDR, Michael Jackson, Mahatma Gandhi, and Helen Keller are all examples of those with whom we are not simply impressed with the novel accomplishments they are sometimes best known for, but often so much more in awe of the high level of skill with which they’d achieved those accomplishments. Bests on display challenge thinking. While rare, it is not at all a strange sensation to us as humans to look upon someone’s earth-shattering talent, skill, or undertakings and have those naturally challenge our perceptions of what was or is possible. In absence of that sensation, in absence of the displayed skill needed to tap into such recognition, we stagnate.
I suspect bests on display are doubly necessary for those reaching expert skill levels in multiple divergent disciplines. While the phrase “jack-of-all-trades” had at one time carried with it a weighty impressiveness based on the variant skill levels required to engage in more than one business arena, our culture has since adopted a once joking and all too particular extension to the phrase, “master of none.” When using the latter, we intend to denote the person being described as someone left wanting in just about all areas of life. It is intended as a sheer put-down and we’ve enveloped the full phrase into prevalent common usage as if gaining mastery in more than one unrelated medium is impossible. It’s a phrase that further serves to exclude people from one group or another and a notion that’s allowed us to forget that this perceived “impossibility” was not always so, a manufactured figment of contemporary, westernized society.
In Leonardo da Vinci’s time, for instance, an individual was not considered fully or properly educated if that person could not demonstrate equal masteries in, say, both the mathematics necessary to conceptualize the first helicopter and the artistry necessary to create a Mona Lisa. Today, by contrast, much of our educational system divides along the premise that there are almost always those who excel at math and science and, in a different “homogenous” group, those who excel in language and the arts, a division the layman frequently and mistakenly attributes to a lacking interpretation of right-brain, left-brain function. Multiple masteries and disparate expertise are a far more natural human state than we tend to acknowledge, a step toward a utopian state only hindered by practical societal structure and our presently expected lifespans.
While societies are always changing, ours hopefully for the better, there is still no telling when that “master of none” joke will ever wear thin. There is just something we perceive as strange when we are faced with somebody whose divided attention has afforded him/her great and appropriate acclaim on both sides of said divide. That mysterious strangeness, that underlying unknown that we are prompted to laugh at as a defense mechanism might be akin to, perhaps, the humor in a man wearing a dress.
Milton Berle to John Ritter, Jack Lemmon to Shawn and Marlon Wayans, most would be hard pressed to think of a male comedian in the last five generations who hadn’t at least once donned feminine garb knowing it was a guaranteed hoot. Meanwhile, our society eliminated most laws against cross-dressing, we’ve learned to speak openly in most places about entirely “mixed” preference sets previously indoctrinated along gender boundaries, and massive industries successfully experiment ever further with delivering goods and services targeted to unisex, metrosexual, and gender-nonspecific demographics. Still, we laugh at a man in a dress. It seems to never get old.
We laugh at a soldier-artist. What’s worse, soldiers laugh at solider-artists and artists laugh at soldier-artists. While the “laugh,” in this case may be more of a dismissal, the action is nonetheless sourced from that unexamined, inward sense of “there’s just something funny about that.” The funny (ha-ha) and funny (strange) hail from the same animal place. Not as obvious a question mark as to why a man in a dress is still inherently humorous, the need to poke fun at the multipronged masteries of a single individual also pile up in our entertainments over time.
Beginning with a sketch comedy parody in the 70’s depicting Bob Ross, another soldier-artist reputedly carrying out a life-vow to never again yell; the piece characterized Ross as a Vietnam vet. suffering from PTSD flashbacks while he painted live on the TV program ‘The Joy of Painting.’ Today, YouTube is replete with similar parodies of Ross and his dual career path. These comic vignettes would never have come to pass were there not something inherently humorous to us about a person with each foot in different work shoe. Yet no one ever seems to succinctly pose or answer the question as to why wearing two figurative hats comes off as odd. Why do we respond with laughter? When will we move beyond finding that funny?
The once popular show, ‘In Living Color’ used Damon Wayans’ comic talent to help depict a West Indian family in America, each member of which held upwards of ten jobs. Eight jobs was considered “lazy.”
There’d been more than one late night programming joke rolled out when actor Paul Newman lent his name to a soon successful line of salad dressings.
Michael Keaton fleshes out the humor in the feature film, ‘The Other Guys,’ by playing a police captain who moonlights as a manager at Bed, Bath, and Beyond.
The feature film ‘Showtime’ engaged audiences with classic Eddie Murphy riffing while his character was both a police officer and a fledgling actor. Even Murphy’s ‘Showtime’ counterpart, played by Robert De Niro, is a cop who’s taken up a pottery hobby, laughable also.
Famed pro-wrestler Jesse Ventura (James George Janos), also a Navy veteran, was not initially taken all that seriously in his victorious run for the office of Governor of Minnesota. Similar might be said about body-builder/actor/Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the late performer and one time Mayor of Palms Springs, California, Sonny Bono, and attorney/lobbyist/actor/Senator Fred Dalton Thompson who, unlike most others, excelled at a career in acting secondary to his earlier paths.
There even exists a running joke among most professional actors stated as “What I really want to do is direct,” facetiously poking fun presumably know-nothing “talents” thinking themselves “smart” enough to take control of an entire stage or film production.
While the comic visuals of men in dresses stick in our minds over time, as a group we largely fail to examine why dual career paths remain guaranteed fodder for earnest scoffing and jokes. It’s not until we collect the examples into one place that this brand of humor becomes even obvious to us. If we are at all destined to retire either comic subject into the “been there, done that” tome, it would seem that the tack we most remember might be closer to a natural finality than the one we scarcely mention. So, in the case of these two examples, people attempting to master more than one trade are like to have far longer-lasting hurdles to overcome than even those who wish to dress “counter-culture.”
Masters of multiple trades must impressively reach the public eye in overwhelming numbers before this humor and the unconscious or preconceived notions that inform this humor can fade into obscurity. When that happens, we will all find ourselves freer to decisively take hold of the endless pluralities it seems advanced society is promising us. As a child, when my mother asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I gave the standard list of hopeful, exciting labels. I wanted to be a cowboy and a baseball player, an astronaut and a firefighter, a movie star and a doctor. She parented as would many responding, “You can be whatever you want to be if you work really hard and you focus on your goal.” Well, without disparaging mother, who likely attributed my full answer to childish indecisiveness, I must say that if I truly WANTED to do all of the above, I could not be what I wanted to be. Hers was an unintentional lie. Our layered systems are not set up for being a cowboy on Monday, an astronaut Tuesday, and so on. We rarely even imagine what it would take to make such interdisciplinary expertise both possible and trustworthy. The idea comes off as far-fetched and as such, ridiculous.
Kudos to Lieutenant Colonel Richardson and to blog posts like this that spotlight the many dual career successes that exist, despite the societal odds stacked in their opposition.
@Robert, you make important points about the challenges of having two careers, with many interesting examples. Of course, those with two jobs will be better at both when they pursue them openly, and integrate them mindfully.
Pingback: 18 Ways You Can Come Out at Work Today | Whole Wide Work