Nicoletta Baumeister, "Lost In Transfer": What Does It Mean To Paint In A Digital World?

I had the pleasure of being commissioned by the Surrey Art Gallery to write a catalogue essay featuring artist Nicoletta Baumeister on the occasion of her exhibition, In the Realm of Perception, curated by Rhys Edwards and running Jan 19, 2019 - Mar 24, 2019. The essay evolved out of a long interview with Baumeister where we discussed her interest in human perception and commitment to painting as her medium of choice. We also touched on the use of irony and humour in her work, and how the turn to abstraction in painting suits her specific interest in exploring memory, experience, and notions of the real. The complete catalogue can now be purchased at a launch event being held tonight, March 14th, at the gallery at 7:00pm. You can also preview and download the beautifully illustrated publication online at this link or view it as a PDF below the text of my essay. All copyright for this essay belongs to the Surrey Art Gallery. Reprinted with permission.

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Nicoletta Baumeister

“Lost In Transfer”

by Dorothy Barenscott

When we examine the world through a painted image, we are invited to perceive. It is through the act of perception that we come to discern, to recognize, to raise awareness, and to regard with attention. How and why and through what means a painting is created is seldom the focus. Instead, we are most often seduced by the talents of the painter, or the traditional mimetic function of the medium to represent some knowable reality or state of experience. But perhaps most of all, we are often seeking something authentic through the painted image, knowing that we are looking at a material object created by the hands of a human being. When Nicoletta Baumeister is asked what it means to be a painter in a digital world, she responds that for her the most valuable art is the one where somebody is thinking, experiencing, and discovering, not just replicating. Intuition and feeling, and trusting one’s own senses, are prioritized in her art practice. “Really good art,” explains Baumeister, “nurtures you.”

In today’s technologically accelerated and distracted screen culture—where the world of entertainment, news media, our family and friends, advertisers, and even the world of art, co-mingle visual environments— contemporary artists are challenged to employ conceptual strategies that reveal manifold mechanisms of representation and slippery notions of the real. Within this context, Baumeister’s desire to nurture her audience is driven by a passion to both raise awareness around the contingent and unfixed aspects of reality, but also to capture audience interest through the mechanisms of authentic human observation, memory, and attention. For Baumeister, the distinction between seeing, perceiving, and thinking is critical. This distinction, and apprehending what is lost in transfer between stages of experience and interpretation, are underlying currents of her art practice. In painting series such as “Seeing” (2002) and “Looking” (2003), which interrogate the nature of still life representation, to recent and multiple series of abstract paintings (2012-2017) categorized by titles such as Chaos and Order, Thinking, A Memory, and Pattern, Baumeister operates on the liminal margin between logic and intuition.

Baumeister’s focus is both timely and relevant and reflects a world that is at a critical stage of reassessment following the social, cultural, political, and economic impacts of globalizing technologies. In “Against the Novelty of New Media: The Resuscitation of the Authentic,” art historian Erica Balsom argues how the art world in recent years has rehabilitated a return to the referent and investment in human presence as a reaction to what is effaced in the newly emerging techno-environment: “The resuscitation of the authentic is… a persistent reminder that there is both a danger and a value in the rejection of things as they are.”[1] For Baumeister, exploring the nature of perception begins with her early years as a figurative painter, where the careful and relentless study of objects yielded critical moments of observation. “I was painting a flower long enough to see it move” she describes, and with this awareness grew the revelation that no matter how much she attempted to isolate reality into one discrete picture, the full scope of her perception fell short in the fixed image. Baumeister’s personal observations as an artist working in the studio also extended to the world around her. In the years following her art training at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (from 1978 to 1983), Baumeister describes one transformative episode in 1985 when she travelled from Canada to Europe at the same time as the Air India Flight 182 bombing. As she attempted to make sense of the tragic event, she picked up multiple newspapers, all with different accounts, narratives, and analyses of what had transpired. “What struck me,” she recounts, “was that I was seeing objective reporting, but all the reporting had something different, and I was left grasping what was real and objective.”

For the past century and a half, painting has been at the center of a struggle over representational power of precisely the kind Baumeister is invested in. A firm underpinning to Baumeister’s approach—exploring the disconnection between objective reality and subjective experience—connects her to a rich history of avant-garde artists who explored the possibilities, challenges, and limits to traditional painting and drawing. The turn to increasing abstraction and expressionism challenged the mimetic tradition of picture composition associated with painting from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century. This accompanied seismic shifts in the twentieth century as a result of new media and industrializing technologies. Free from rules and predictable referents connected to the long history of realist painting, the move towards abstraction and expressionism allowed a new generation of artists, such as those associated with the Fauves, Cubists, Russian Suprematists, German and Austrian Expressionists, and American Abstract Expressionists, to channel pure will and explore dimensionality and a range of human sensorium in new and unexpected ways. In terms of these formal experiments, Baumeister strongly identifies with the colour palette and sinuous lines of Viennese Secession painter Egon Schiele, for example. Traces of Schiele’s influence can be found in many of her watercolour paintings such as Like the Wind Knows the Tree (1994), while her love for the freely-scribbled, playful, graffiti-like works of Cy Twombly emerge in her “Pattern” series of abstract acrylics (2012-2015). Drawing, in particular, is the connective tissue in Baumeister’s art practice, authenticating and grounding the external experience of the world through mark-making.

Nicoletta Baumeister, One Of A Kind? (2017) offers an important meditation on questions of the original and even a reassessment of how Walter Benjamin’s concept of the aura—the uniqueness and aesthetic experience associated with being in the presence of an original work of art—can be recast in a twenty-first century world.

In terms of content, Baumeister finds inspiration in another related group of twentieth century avant-garde artists—the Dada and Surrealists— who worked to disrupt the representation of stable objects through strategies of satire, irreverence, and the upending of expectations around art and the role of the artist. Baumeister references, for example, Berlin Dada artist George Grosz, whose drawings and paintings ruthlessly critiqued German society as it gave way to Nazi rule. Not surprisingly, Baumeister aligns her own political and social interests as an artist with that of Grosz, encouraging her audience to pay closer attention, and, in her own words, “read the fine print” in a world that is not always as it appears. Baumeister also raises the importance of Belgian Surrealist artist René Magritte, whose famous work The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) (1929) reveals the ever-present chasm between language, image, and meaning. Magritte’s proposition finds deep resonance in several of Baumeister’s works, perhaps most poignantly in her watercolour painting Avalanche (1997) which re-presents and playfully disassembles the semiotics of a tourist postcard.

Turning closer to home, Baumeister is well situated in a city that often prizes a more conceptual approach to art. And while as a painter she has not taken up the camera, motion pictures, or the screen as directly as most artists associated with Vancouver photo-conceptualism, Baumeister is closely aligned with many concerns and interests among a range of Lower Mainland artists through explorations into the crisis of representation and the desire to subvert signs associated with the landscape and human environment. Baumeister’s featured art work for the exhibition, One of a Kind? (2017), offers one such potent example. Arranged as a large-scale piece made up of fourteen digitally printed canvases surrounding an original oil painting, the work becomes apparent to the viewer upon closer observation when it is realized that the content printed on each of the canvasses is a digital copy of the oil painting. As Baumeister explains, the subject of the original painting—dahlia flowers — was connected both to her online identity as a floral painter (the paintings she sells to a wide public to earn a living), and to a subject matter that she had learned to reproduce through many years of repetitive composition and multi-media formats (graphite, watercolour, acrylics, and oil). Repetition and the copy were foremost in her mind when she conceived the piece, but also, as she describes, “the problem of authenticating what occurs in the real world.” Sharing examples with me, ranging from the problem of locating the original source of honey (sometimes marketed as originating from places that don’t actually have honey bees), to the difficulty of differentiating synthetic from naturally made fabrics, Baumeister’s intention was to replicate a similar process in One of a Kind?. Audiences would be confronted with the question of what changed and/or was lost in the move from her original handmade painting to the enlarged digital facsimile made by a machine.

One of a Kind? offers an important meditation on questions of the original and even a reassessment of how Walter Benjamin’s concept of the aura—the uniqueness and aesthetic experience associated with being in the presence of an original work of art—can be recast in a twenty-first century world.[2] As Balsom argues, “understanding what counts as ‘art after the internet’ might necessitate expanding one’s purview far beyond artworks produced through digital means.”[3] At the same time, the work is deeply ironic, evoking questions and even cynical reflections on an art world and emerging generation of artists that appear to be losing something in a world where scanning, feeds, and fake news supplant deeper reading, visual literacy, and historical perspective. As Baumeister and I discuss at some length, there is a sense that something deeper, more embodied, and truly lived and experienced, is desired by many. “Time is the only commodity you have,” Baumeister offers, “and it’s how you spend it that is so important. I keep watching these young kids scanning as opposed to living; and I know enough about perception to know that the things we take in are what we ultimately use to create structures and put all other information onto. And if the structure is already filtered through someone else’s lens, and not real, as in experienced through your own senses, how do you authenticate something?” Indeed, the question of how and to what ends art will be created, produced, and disseminated in the future appears closely tied to similar crises around representation, time, and mechanisms of industrialization experienced over a century ago. This time, however, the stakes appear much higher, with spatial and temporal dislocations fundamentally recasting the world of human perception. As internet artist Brad Troemel argues in “Art After Social Media,” “…for the generation of artists coming of age today, it’s the high-volume, high paced endeavour of social media’s attention economy that mimics the digital economy of stock trading… For these artists, art is no longer merely traded like a stock—it is created like one too.”[4]

What can painting teach us today? This is one of the enduring questions we are left with when encountering In the Realm of Perception. And while it is true that painting has faced pronouncements of its imminent death many times over the past half century, there is something clearly timely and deeply significant about studying the nature of perception through this particular medium.[5] As Art historian David Joselit has suggested, pointing to the “transitive” nature of our world today, a world in which digital networks routinely translate cultural artifacts into code, there is something to behold and learn when a body of painting “is submitted to infinite dislocations, fragmentations, and degradations.”[6] Clearly, as Baumeister observes, there are many undiscovered connections yet to be made and the capacity of art to nurture individuals goes hand in hand with human connection, “For me, my analog world is real to me, it comes from my senses, and I’m certain that is how we authenticate and ground our external experience of our world… I’m always bringing it back to that when I’m painting. I want to create a map of sorts, of something that I feel, I see, I hear, I think, and try to distill the proper components so that you could read the same thing, if you wanted to, or create a paradigm where the relationship between the items creates a meaning.”

[1] Erika Balsom, “Against the Novelty of New Media: The Resuscitation of the Authentic,” in You Are Here—Art After the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif (Manchester, HOME and SPACE Press, 2017), 76.

[2] See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations ed. Hannah Arendt. New York, Schocken, 1969, 217-259.

[3] Balsom.

[4] Brad Troemel, “Art After Social Media,” You Are Here—Art After the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif (Manchester, HOME and SPACE Press, 2017), 42.

[5] See for example Douglas Crimp, “There is No Final Picture: A Conversation Between Philip Kaiser and Douglas Crimp,” in Painting on the Move, ed. Bernhard Mendes et al (Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel and Schwabe, 2002), 171-179.

[6] David Joselit, “Painting Beside Itself,” October vol. 130 (Fall, 2009): 134.]

Weekly Flipboard Links and Media Roundup

This past week the art world lost Carolee Schneemann, a true avant-garde legend and artist provocateur, at the age of 79. Schneemann has long been featured prominently in all of my modern and contemporary art history courses as an artist who both experimented in multiple media forms, but also never quite fit comfortably in her role as a “performance” or a “feminist” artist. In fact, it has only really been in the last decade and a half or so that the mainstream of the art world has fully recognized Schneemann’s importance in bridging the world of painting, installation, and body art. Perhaps more significantly, Schneemann’s art has long confronted issues related to women’s pleasure and sexuality in novel and subversive ways, and not always comfortably or without controversy. She will be missed.

Also included in my round up this week are reactions to the television debut of Leaving Neverland, the HBO co-produced film by director Dan Reed. Having first heard of the movie as a Sundance Film Festival feature, I looked forward to watching it both for its narrative choices and cinematography (both of which have proved very controversial). I include a great article and podcast exploring many dimensions of the movie— both at the level of what is examined, but also how the film is put together formally. As a Gen-Xer I was also very sad to hear of the passing of Luke Perry of 90210 teen drama fame. Who could forget the enigmatic Dylan McKay? At the same time, I was made aware this week of the 25th anniversary of another Gen X classic—Reality Bites. Completing my roundup is a look at L.A.’s first art fair from a few weeks ago; a review of a Marina Abramovic mockumentary (!); a great TateShots video of the Guerilla Girls (Happy International Women’s Day!); a Dior tribute video to coincide with a new exhibition opening in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum celebrating the designer’s legacy and influence; and a compelling interview with Jiang Xue, an investigative journalist living and working in China who is enduring the latest crackdown on civil society and independent thinking in her country.

 Enjoy the links and cross your fingers that spring is actually coming! You can access by browsing the image thumbnails in the gallery below and clicking on what interests you, or scrolling to the bottom of the page and selecting the easy links.

Carolee Schneemann, Visionary Feminist Performance Artist, Dies at 79

Reality Bites Captured Gen X With Perfect Irony

Mockumentary Series Documentary Now! Makes a Brilliant Parody of Marina Abramović

It’s Too Late to Cancel Michael Jackson

The Culture Gabfest “Michael Jackson” Edition (PODCAST)

An Art Fair Has Never Worked in Los Angeles. Why Did Frieze?

‘It’s Hopeless But You Persist’: An Interview with Jiang Xue

Luke Perry’s Startling Vulnerability in the “Beverly Hills, 90210” Episode “The Dreams of Dylan McKay”

Guerrilla Girls – 'You Have to Question What You See' | TateShots (VIDEO)

Fashion in Motion / Inspired by Christian Dior (VIDEO)

• Carolee Schneemann, Visionary Feminist Performance Artist, Dies at 79

• Reality Bites Captured Gen X With Perfect Irony

• Mockumentary Series Documentary Now! Makes a Brilliant Parody of Marina Abramović

• It’s Too Late to Cancel Michael Jackson

• The Culture Gabfest “Michael Jackson” Edition (PODCAST)

• An Art Fair Has Never Worked in Los Angeles. Why Did Frieze?

• ‘It’s Hopeless But You Persist’: An Interview with Jiang Xue

• Luke Perry’s Startling Vulnerability in the “Beverly Hills, 90210” Episode “The Dreams of Dylan McKay”

• Guerrilla Girls – 'You Have to Question What You See' | TateShots (VIDEO)

• Fashion in Motion / Inspired by Christian Dior (VIDEO)

The Avant-Guardian Won't Give Up: A Short Statement of Reboot and Renewal

I find it almost too fitting to select an art work with the provocative title L’avant-garde ne se rend pas (The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up) to breathe new life and energy into my blog. Ever since the end of my sabbatical last summer, I have waited for the right moment to recommit to my minimum weekly postings, fully aware that the health of any public blog relies upon two key elements— consistency and content. Life has indeed been hectic and in transformation the past year, professionally and personally, and with a range of writing and research projects coming to a close, or at least within a more manageable framework, I am excited to finally recommit to this labour of love that is my blog. Coincidentally, my reboot date, March 3rd, coincides with artist Asger Jorn’s birthday and the selection of this particular work of which art writer Rachel Wetzler has written:

“[as a] found flea-market canvases overlain with childlike doodles and gestural marks, it is a vulgarized portrait of a young girl, redolent of Biedermeier kitsch, to which Jorn has added slightly menacing stick figures and, in a pastiche of Duchamp, a moustache. The titular slogan, scrawled nearly illegibly across the canvas, is insistently ambiguous, ostensibly proclaiming a sincere, ongoing commitment to the avant-garde project while simultaneously mocking its failure to upend much of anything.”

I smiled from ear to ear when I read this description, for it speaks directly to the way I feel about this little corner of the internet that Avant-Guardian Musings has inhabited since September 2010. And here, I want to extend a special thanks to students, friends, and colleagues who have shown such enthusiasm and interest in my blog over the years. In the spirit of Jorn’s 1962 work, L’avant-garde ne se rend pas, an assemblage work that consists of placing markings on a found painting to spark a re-evaluation of its content, my blog has existed from the very beginning as a space of contemplation, of musings. It is my sincere commitment to the avant-garde project and its legacies, impacts, and possible futures that my project belongs. At the same time, I do not pretend that much is achieved through this blog’s existence (especially with respect to how academic ideas are officially valued and given circulation), but I am fully satisfied that this media format, and the content I offer to those who find and read this space, can perhaps inspire and spark a new way of seeing and thinking about the world around us.

In solidarity,

Dorothy Barenscott

Further Reading

Aagesen, Dorthe, and Helle Brøns, Asger Jorn: Restless Rebel. Coppenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst, 2014.

Foster, Hal. "Creaturely Cobra." October 141, (2012): 4-21.

Four Seasons Or What I Learned On My Sabbatical (That Also Applies To A Well Balanced Life) PART TWO

Continuation from PART ONE of this post…..

6. Learn Good Boundaries Around Your Planned Schedule

One of the toughest parts of a sabbatical, and really for academics generally, is getting others outside our orbit to understand the demands on our time. While it may appear that we are “not working” in the traditional sense of the word— the hours we spend in a classroom only make up one very small part of our jobs— we are always juggling many tasks. Whether it be lecture prep, grading, committee work, service work, research, writing, conference travel, student advising, event planning… the list goes on and on… there is some part of our brains that is always activated, and it is hard to “turn off” what we do. All of this intensifies with a sabbatical as frameworks for deadlines (from teaching, grading, meetings etc..) disappear and the pressure to execute specific long term projects becomes isolated and dependant on your own time management skills. At the same time, opportunities for sabotage and temptation open up as friends and family see your time on leave as open-ended and a signal that you are somehow taking a vacation from work. Therefore, learning to police your time wisely and explaining early on to loved ones what it is you are setting out to accomplish on your sabbatical is critical to success. Blocking out dedicated time in your schedule for lunch/dinner dates, special events, and downtime is also important so that firm boundaries exist around work-specific times in your day/week/month, and so that you can point to optional times in your schedule when you are available without distraction. This is also why Lesson #1 and Lesson #2 are non-negotiable. The upside is that you can enjoy time with friends and family without guilt or worry over what “you should be doing.”

7. KNOW YOUR WORK HABITS TENDENCY

Now that you have time carved out and dedicated to specific tasks, the challenge arises around two evils: procrastination and honouring limits. First, about procrastination. As much as we imagine our perfectly planned routines and schedules to catapult us to success, the reality is that you may not feel like doing what is on your agenda on any given day. If you are at all familiar with Gretchen Rubin’s book The Four Tendencies, you will know that she divides personality types into four distinct patterns when it comes to approaching routine and habits: Upholders, Questioners, Obligers, and Rebels. Essentially, what Rubin argues (and we all know to be true) is that we are all motivated in different ways and for different reasons. Here is a rough break down from her book on how this looks:

• Upholders meet inner and outer expectations. They love rules, having a clear plan and are self-motivated and disciplined. Clearly tell them what needs to be done and they’ll lead the way.

• Questioners meet their own expectations, but resist outer ones. They need to see purpose and reason in anything they do. Make it clear why what you want from them is important.

• Obligers meet other peoples’ expectations easily, but struggle with their own. The must be held accountable by a friend, coach or boss to get things done. They thrive when they have a sense of duty and can work in a team.

• Rebels defy both outer and inner expectations. Above all, they want to be free to choose and express their own individuality. Give them the facts, present the task as a challenge and let them decide without pressure.

Me, I am a Rebel through and through with shades of the Questioner, and this means that I must build in tons of flexibility and purpose to whatever task I have at hand. When I sit down to work, I have a list of options so that I can select a task (within reason and that meets my broader goals/deadlines) that suits my mood or answers a particular interest I am pursuing in the moment. Others, like Upholders are much luckier and can just start at the top of the list, or if you are an Obliger, you tend to do better when you are in a group challenge, or are promising to someone else to meet a deadline. Bottom line, you have to know yourself when it comes to why you procrastinate and be prepared to engineer success based on your work habits tendencies.

Time will pass whether you plan for it or not….

8. EMBRACE THE POWER OF INTERVAL TRAINING

This leads to the second evil— honouring limits. All of us have experienced that sense of total immersion in a project, where time and space evaporate and creativity reigns. And ironically enough, this immersion often comes after some period of procrastination, setting up that scenario where you are pulling all-nighters or inadvertently working well into other parts of your schedule, breaking the entire premise of Lesson #6. While this way of working can be useful from time to time, it is unsustainable as a long-term strategy and leads to a very out of balance life (I know this from experience!). Enter interval training or the Pomodoro technique— the practice of doing short and intense periods of work followed by rest and recovery. This lesson was so profoundly important to my sabbatical that I blogged about it earlier this year. The importance of interval training is that you are setting up the habit of coaxing yourself into work (which is half the battle) but then teaching yourself to pull away and rest (the other half of the battle). The result is balance and establishing the confidence to know that you are getting a bit done day by day instead of building anxiety around the expectation of one enormous work period. As I like to ask my students by way of metaphor: “Which is more productive? Going to to the gym for one hour, three days a week, for twelve weeks to build your body, or spending one whole week all day in the gym once every six months to meet those same goals?” I think we all know the answer.

The steps of the Pomodoro technique are dead simple:

1. Decide on the task you want to tackle

2. Set a timer for the work interval you choose (25-45 minutes is the norm)

3. Work on the task without any distractions during that time (i.e. turn off all external stimuli)

4. End work when the timer goes off

5. Take a break away from your desk for the time you choose (5-15 minutes). Congratulations, you have completed one Pomodoro

6. Repeat, and after 3-4 Pomodoros, finish for the day, or take a break equivalent to one Pomodoro (25-45 minutes) before returning to work

Interval training got me to where I am in the gym. As I learned this year, it should be no different in my work and professional life.

9. UNPLUG, Delegate, and Outsource Whenever Possible

I still remember the day that I discovered grocery home delivery. In fact, it still makes me giddy with delight just thinking about it. For me, grocery shopping— planning, making lists, driving, parking, shopping, unloading the car etc…— was easily 3-4 hours of my life each week doing something I loathed. Once I outsourced grocery shopping to a delivery service that allows me to shop online from a saved list and schedule drop off at whatever time suits my schedule, I clawed back several hours every week for tasks I would rather do. My point here is that it is worth looking into what tasks/obligations you can either unplug, delegate, and outsource. Whether it be hiring someone to clean your home a few times a month, or mind your child, walk your dog, or delegate some of your tasks (taxes, travel plans, etc..) to others, there is value in calculating the time and energy you gain in exchange for the expenditure. Another important aspect of this lesson is learning to saying no to invitations or requests that you would normally take on during the academic year. Now is the time to rescue hours in your day. This includes visiting your home campus during the sabbatical year (DON’T) or writing letters of reference (AVOID unless absolutely necessary) or agreeing to any form of committee work while on leave (YOU WILL REGRET IT). You get the picture.

Unplugging, delegating, and outsourcing gave me more time to enjoy bike riding and latte drinking. But seriously, calculate what your time is worth and make some decisions to claw back precious hours in your week.

10. Try on New Habits For Your Return To Work

The final lesson is the one I am currently working on and refining as I transition back to work— figuring out which of my habits and routines from the sabbatical year will find their way into my regular life. Importantly, I was already thinking about my return to work well before September, and had already began drafting imagined “back to work” calendars in late spring to envision what the new post-sabbatical me may bring. Three weeks into a new semester, I can report that most significantly I am maintaining and policing my fitness schedule, but have dropped from training five days a week to 3-4 days a week, depending on my grading and lecture prep load. I have also continued to schedule in time each week for drawing, reading for pleasure, and downtime. Sunday, especially, remains pretty sacred in this regard, and I try not to schedule any work on that day so that I can enjoy time with my husband and/or friends and loved ones. I have also looked carefully over the next twelve months for opportunities to work on my bucket list. My goal of acquiring my motorcycle license is in the works for next spring/summer, and I have two trips/mini-vacations planned, along with some other non-academic related writing goals. Above all, my sabbatical has taught me how to dial back the anxiety and stress I often experienced in the course of a regular academic year. Planning and boundary-setting have resulted in gaining some measure of control, and guilt-free time, in my day to day life. As a result, not only am I a better professor and researcher, I am also a more balanced individual.

Four Seasons Or What I Learned On My Sabbatical (That Also Applies To A Well Balanced Life) PART ONE

One year ago, I began my first formal sabbatical as part of my faculty appointment at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Taking leave to pursue research and other projects is a tradition well established within academia, but also dates back as a practice to biblical times, signalling a break from work (sabbatical from the Greek work sabbatikos —a “ceasing”). To be sure, the very concept flies in the face of our fast-paced and profit driven world, and I too had approached the application with some trepidation as I was happy with the hard-won rhythm established in my teaching and work life. Still, with a book project in press and my co-editor just coming off her own sabbatical to pass the baton to me, it was necessary to take the plunge and set out on a four season odyssey that ended up being one of the most profound and transformative years of my life.

Now however exaggerated or overblown that may sound, upon reflection I have come to realize that the most important lessons of my year’s leave are ones that will continue to guide me as I transition back to my normal (and now hopefully more balanced) life. Having the privilege of standing back and gaining a new perspective on how I choose to live day to day was not something I wanted to take for granted. In fact, my biggest fear was not utilizing this gift of time and space wisely. But as I wound down the twelve months, the take-away lessons crystalized, and I have assembled them here as a list of ten, in hopes that some of them may be of use to others who are either getting ready to take the sabbatical plunge or simply looking to find more balance in their lives. Part One continues below, and I will post Part Two later in the week.

1. PLAN FOR YOUR TIME

In the months leading up to my official leave date, I began looking for resources to help plan for my sabbatical. Speaking with those who had embarked on one or more leaves already, it became clear that almost everyone approached the sabbatical differently, and often without much guidance. Three books that were incredibly helpful early on in my hunt were Reboot Your Life: Energize Your Career and Life By Taking A Break and Designing Your Life. Both texts lay out a blueprint for brainstorming and assessing how to identify and prioritize the way you want to spend large amounts of unstructured time. And while the books only touch on academic sabbaticals in passing, they do land on the idea of being realistic about what can be accomplished, and learning to think about your leave in terms of short-term and long-term goals. The book that I found most impactful with respect to time management for academic researchers was Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success In A Distracted World. I returned to this text several times over the past year, and recommend Newport’s many tips and suggestions for blocking out intensive periods of work, followed by time for fun and reflection. As I blogged earlier this year about the book, Newport distinguishes his approach by discussing strategies that are not only geared to finding the time to accomplish goals and build routine and structure into one's life, but also focused on helping harness the mental state of deep focus, concentration, and flow, that drives creativity and productivity. 

2. CREATE A ROUTINE

This little productivity planner was essential to tracking how I was using my day-to-day time and reflecting on the big picture of my weekly routines. Together with Google Calendar (on all of my devices), I was set for the year.

Building structure and predictability into your day is much easier than it sounds. When you have a regular job, deadlines, and obligations to others that are absolutely non-negotiable, the structure and routine emerge out of necessity. At the other extreme, staring at a blank calendar for twelve months is incredibly daunting, and the only thing I can compare it to is the final years of my Ph.D. when it was left entirely up to me to produce a book-length dissertation. After many weeks of reveling in the freedom of unsupervised time, I realized that I would have to build in a system of time management to accomplish the big goals I was expected to achieve. A similar situation quickly emerged with the sabbatical. I had submitted a proposal promising several items— a co-edited book collection, the placement of new publications, research for travel, conferences, and new projects, and planning for new courses and a textbook. Any one of these items could send me down a rabbit hole in terms of time, and so I decided to divide out my twelve months into smaller chunks of time comprising weeks and then days where I would focus only on one of the above projects. At the end of each week and each month, I would assess what I had accomplished and how well my expectations were being met. Often, I would under or overestimate the time I was using and adjust accordingly. At the level of weekdays, I ended up scheduling 4-5 hours daily on uninterrupted and undistracted work (Deep Work helped me achieve this), and made sure to build a routine that included time for breaks, reflection, downtime, and of course, the time to do the things I could not possibly accomplish in a regular year at work. Using Google Calendar, Evernote, and the Productivity Planner, I also learned to honour my schedule and start and stop my scheduled tasks however immersed I was (more on the importance of this later in PART TWO of the post) or however much I wanted to procrastinate (more on this too later).

3. SCHEDULE IN BUCKET LIST PROJECTS/GOALS

For most people, the special significance of the sabbatical is the freedom to do an entire range of things that you normally would not have the time, space, or means to achieve. These are all of those bucket list projects and goals that you always say you would do “if I had the time.” For me, travel is at the very top of that list, and I spent many weeks ahead of my leave scheduling trips that would both support my research and allow for extended visits to places I had always wanted to see. In the end, I traveled over my sabbatical to many art cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, Rome, Florence, and Barcelona. I also made sure to schedule vacation time both locally and abroad to recharge outside of the fast-paced itineraries of the big city visits. My bucket list also included taking time to draw and make art, and so I scheduled several hours a week to sit with my sketchbook, charcoal, pencils, and other materials, and made sketching a big part of my travels. Another bucket list item was to plan several motorbiking day trips with my husband, and we rented motorbikes abroad to continue exploring the hobby that I hope will have me fully licensed by next year. In the end, committing to your bucket list is a critical part of the sabbatical year. Making a list of hobbies, trips, projects, plans, etc… is something we should always be doing, and I have learned this year that it is vital to schedule time every week so that your bucket list, in whatever small way, can be realized little by little.

4. BE PREPARED FOR THE UNEXPECTED

With all my talk of planning, schedules, and routine, it is critical to remember that all of your preparation can be side-lined with the unexpected. In my case, that unexpected moment came two days into my sabbatical when my husband suffered a bicycle accident that had him laid up at home for four months. Suddenly, all of my plans for solitary work, research, and reflection, were replaced with the duties of nursing and caring for an injured spouse. At first, this was an incredibly difficult situation, but within a few weeks, I learned to embrace the new challenges I was facing and established new routines and goals for my sabbatical. The upside to this was that I learned how to become flexible with my schedule and prioritize what was truly pressing and most important. And while this example is more extreme (and yes, thankfully, my husband is mostly recovered and back to work), the unexpected may arise in the form of other people not meeting deadlines or rescheduling as a result of their own unexpected life events. Planning for and expecting these moments is key, and I have learned to roll with what comes my way, knowing that any tendency for perfectionism has to go out the window if you want to actually achieve your goals. In hindsight we all learn that we can get through and survive the many challenges and setbacks life throws at us. Learning what is and what is not in your control was one of the biggest lessons I learned this year.

5. PLAN FOR YOUR PHYSICAL GOALS

One of the most important goals I set out for the year, above and beyond my professional projects, was the desire for increased energy and physical health to support my busy academic schedule. This came down to one of the toughest decisions I made— scheduling dedicated time every day for exercise, with a goal of building muscle, reducing fat, and finding a healthy weight that I could maintain over the long haul. Since becoming a full time faculty member, the time I used to commit to exercise and sleep were slowly eroded and taken over by time to complete grading, research, and other day-to-day errands that I felt were more important. In hindsight, I realize how short-sighted I had become— not prioritizing my health— and with a recent health scare in my past, I knew that this was one goal I had no excuse not to pursue during my leave. Early into the sabbatical, I returned to my love of weight lifting (a hobby I had enjoyed off and on since my late teens) and running. I also adopted a very sensible calories in, calories out diet that had me eating three meals a day with no snacks at a moderate deficit. Having dabbled in some extreme veganism and other restrictive dieting in the past, I knew that whatever eating plan I chose had to be realistic and, most critically, sustainable when I returned to work. I also made sure to sleep 7-8 hours a night and schedule naps whenever possible. I gave myself a year to achieve the goal of losing forty pounds and cutting my body fat percentage down to the mid-20% range, and I am very happy to report that not only did I meet this goal early (in 10 months, see before and after progress pictures below), but I have gone on to exceed my original plans. Bottom line, I want to emphasize that the best outcome of this fitness journey was the ENERGY that I was able to gain. While the aesthetics of losing weight are fantastic, the ability to feel better in my own skin and feel more in control of my weight and health is one of the best gifts of the past twelve months.

That wraps up PART ONE, I will go on to discuss the final five lessons later this week in PART TWO of my post…..