Starting Over with a Creative Life featuring Nell Painter

Takeaways: 

• Age should never be a barrier to creativity.
• Role models can play a big part in your creative journey, especially for women.
• You shouldn’t listen to other people’s views of yourself; it’s what you think about yourself that matters.
• Constraints are opportunities, which is a big part of the No Time to be Timid manifesto. 

Resources:

• Check out Nell’s website.
• Follow her on instagram @nellpainter.

Transcript

Nell Painter 

I’m Nell Painter and I do a lot of things. I write history, I make drawings, I knit. And I just want to tell you all this is no time to be timid.

Tricia Burt 

Hey there, I’m Trisha Rose Burt, and in this podcast, we talk to artists who show us how to find the courage to take risks, step out of our comfort zones, and use our creativity to make our work and change our world. Pay close attention, because this is no time to be timid. 

Hey there and welcome to the show. If you’re a regular listener, you know that I live in the woods in New Hampshire, and my particular woods are rife with artists and writers. About 10 minutes from my house is MacDowell, the nation’s oldest artist residency, where artists are offered time and space to do their work. Every summer they have a big celebration called Medal Day, where they honor an artist of particular significance. Think Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Yoko Ono.

And at that event, the chairman of the board always makes some remarks. The current chairman of the board is Nell Painter. Nell wrote the book Old in Art School, a memoir of starting over, which was named a National Book Critics Circle finalist. And it’s a story of her leaving a rich academic career in history to go to art school at the age of 65. Now I didn’t know Nell, but I’d read her book, which was crazy inspiring. So after the ceremony, I went up to her and I said,

that I was old in art school too, and that I have a podcast called No Time to Be Timid, and would she like to be on the show? And without skipping a beat, she said yes. So today we’re talking to the aptly named Nell Painter, now 82 years old, who is so generous, curious, and passionate about her creative work, especially her addictions to knitting and ink, it helped me not to be intimidated by her academic achievements, which are vast. She’s the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University. In addition to writing Old and Art School, she’s the author of the New York Times bestseller, The History of White People, Sojourner Truth, A Life, Symbol, and her most recent book, I Just Keep Talking, which was named one of the New York Times’ notable books of 2024. Since 2007, she’s been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and she’s received honorary degrees from Yale, Wesleyan, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Dartmouth oh and she earned a PhD in history from Harvard too. On the artist’s front, she earned degrees in painting from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers and the Rhode Island School of Design and she’s made artist books and residencies such as MacDowell, Yaddo, and UCross. Our conversation focuses on the ups and downs of her creative journey and how her formidable courage was further forged. We talk about how age should never be a barrier to creativity. Role models can play a big part in your creative journey, especially for women. You shouldn’t listen to other people’s views of yourself. It’s what you think about yourself that matters. Constraints or opportunities, a big part of the No Time To Be Timid manifesto. And since neither Nell nor I have children, I asked her thoughts about that life experience. It’s part of an overall fascinating discussion that I think you’ll enjoy. Thanks for joining us. 

Tricia Burt

Hey, Nell, thank you so much for joining us on the show.

Nell Painter 

Well, I’m happy to be here with you.

Tricia Burt  

Well, I have read your book, Old in Art School. And so I was thinking, what’s the way I want to start? And I just have to start with your mother, who wrote a book with probably one of the best titles ever. Ever. I hope I look that good when I’m that old. 

Nell Painter 

Yeah Isn’t it a wonderful title? Can you imagine a woman about 80 with the chutzpah, with the cajones to use that title?

Tricia Burt  

I loved it. Like, just was like, that is a person I wish I had known. You know, I really wish I had known her.

Nell Painter 

The marvelous thing, Trisha, is that my mother was very shy for most of her life. That’s what you were saying. She came into her life at 65. Wow. I hope I look that good with her second book. But she started writing when she was 65. 

Tricia Burt  

This is so important now as women. I’m 64 and I had a wonderful guest on the show, Tanya Trotter, and she’s part of a duo, husband and wife duo, the War and Treaty. And she was saying, some people, you know, society kind of throws us away after a certain age. And she said, but some people throw themselves away. And I thought, that’s so interesting. And it’s like your mother, just like, I’m not throwing myself away. I’m gonna write two books after I’m 65. I mean, you know, it was such an inspiration, you know, such an inspiration. Also, what a role model for you because then you just decided, well, I think I’ll retire at early 60s and start a whole new career as well. This idea of role model is important. It’s important to me at 64 going, okay, who’s still curious, who’s still making stuff, who’s still engaged, who’s still trying to make a difference, which is why I was really excited about having you on the show. You’ve been a historian for how many years? You’ve been a historian forever?

Nell Painter 

I think it’s 50 years.

Tricia Burt  

But you played around though in high school, you were in art, you were making art, you were interested in art. And I loved when you said you had role models in academia, but you didn’t have role models in art. And so that was an easier path.

Nell Painter 

Absolutely. Let’s see, I graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011. And it took me about 10 years to find my footing, putting together both myself as a historian and myself as a visual artist. So it does take some time.

Tricia Burt  

I have that as a quote I wanted to talk to you about because you said when you make that switch it takes you about a week to go from one sort of to the other and I totally get that. I mean when I start drawing I have to use my left hand even though I’m right-handed because I have to kick off. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they taught me that in art school. I went to the School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Nell Painter 

So you really got trained.

Tricia Burt  

Really, I resonated with so much of your book because I was consulting at Fidelity Investments in Harvard Business School at the same time while I was a part-time student at the museum school. And so doing these shifts back and forth was like, okay, what, what? And so I understand that weird integration that has to happen. Does it feel different in your body? Does Nell’s body feel one way as a historian and does it feel another way when you’re making art?

Nell Painter 

Probably. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I will tell you that I have a reptilian brain in my gut, and it tells me what to draw when I’m drawing, and it tells me what to write when I’m writing. But it takes a while to get up to speed either side. And then when it gets going, it wakes me up at

6:15 and says, hey, write this. Hey, draw this. Yeah. So I’m not drawing right now. I’m writing, but I keep a notepad by my bed because it kept getting me up to go into my writing room and write stuff down. At first I thought, oh, I’ll remember that. That’s so important. What a great word. What a great phrase. I’ll remember that. Then I wake up and it’s just poof.

Tricia Burt  

Okay.

Nell Painter 

I don’t even remember what it was about.

Tricia Burt  

Yeah I know, and you have to grab those moments. I love how Sojourner Truth is the one who brought you i’m gonna say back to your art, because you had been doing it in high school and some in college. I’m gonna say she sort of called you back. I want you to tell our listeners how your history and how this amazing woman in history sort of called you to where you are now.

Nell Painter 

It’s two answers. When you use the word call, Sojourner Truth was calling people at the end of the 20th century. And she called an excellent historian, Margaret Washington, who is a wonderful researcher and whose own book, which came out after mine, is just a real masterpiece of research. And so I depend on her alot. And then also Carleton Mabee , the late Carleton Mabee, who was a professor at New Paltz, which is the home territory of Sojourner Truth. So Sojourner Truth was calling us saying, hey, write about me. And so the three of us did. That’s the calling part. The art part, though, is I first got to that with her because words failed me. She did not read and write. So to try to get to her as her, as she put herself in the world, her own self-fashioning, I had to look at her photographs, which she arranged. She decided how she was going to look, what she was going to wear, what her props were, all of that. So I went to this wonderful place, Princeton’s Art History Library, Marquand,I was so fortunate to have access to this terrific art history library. And I read up on the rhetoric of the image. And I thought, I love this. And that’s how I got that.

Tricia Burt  

That’s so fabulous. I love that way that it brought you back in. I love how that brought you back in. 

Nell Painter 

Yes, so it was a failure of words that turned into a gift of image..

Tricia Burt  

When you went to art school, first of all, I have to just say this. Talk about commitment. When you’re explaining your commute, I’m like, dear God in heaven, I would have collapsed in a heap. I mean, how many minutes? I mean, it was just amazing. 

Nell Painter 

No! it was so easy. This is New Jersey. We commute!

Tricia Burt  

It was like this train to this train to that train that I walked. 

Nell Painter 

Okay, it was 2 trains. It was the light rail. At that time we lived in North Newark right by Branchbrook Park. So I’d walk across the park and take the light rail which went to Newark Penn Station. And at Newark Penn Station I got the Northeast Corridor and a few stops down the line was New Brunswick. It was so easy. And in those days, I could depend entirely on New Jersey Transit. I can’t quite now, unfortunately.

Tricia Burt 

There was something really lovely about the travel it took for you to get there as you were making this transition. 

Nell Painter 

I wrote that part as a love letter. I love New Jersey. It’s so diverse and it has, or had, such wonderful trains. And it has a great state university Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. So I just love New Jersey. And I think anybody who is from New Jersey reading that will understand. I don’t know if people outside of New Jersey, because New Jersey gets such a bad rap.

Tricia Burt  

It does get a bad rap. It does get a bad rap.

Nell Painter 

It really does, and that’s because of being right next to New York City.

Tricia Burt  

I went to art school when I was very unhappy with my life and knew that something had to change and had taken all these different classes. I loved how you said, I think it was in an interview with Debbie Millman about if people are interested about going to art school, like go to a community college and take some classes. Such a good idea to say, you know try it out, put your toe in the water and see what it feels like.

Nell Painter 

Yeah, and also you won’t go broke in community college, which you will in art school.

Tricia Burt  

And we had a former guest, Richard Casper, who was actually a veteran with PTSD. And he was like, he thought he’d get an easy degree in art. And so he went to community college because he thought he’d just get an easy degree. And it ended up completely changing his life. He ended up going to the Art Institute of Chicago. He started this huge foundation to help veterans heal through the arts. It’s remarkable. But I loved your suggestion about that.

Well, I went to art school and I knew that I was turning my life upside down. And every time I walked in that door, I knew I was walking farther away from the life that was outside, 

Nell Painter 

Now, turning it upside down as a good thing?

Tricia Burt  

Yes. I mean, in the middle of it, it was not great, but it turned out to be a fabulous thing, So what did you feel like walking through the door of artschool?

Nell Painter 

I started at Rutgers and I was kind of a freshman. Rutgers gave me a lot of credit for my first bachelor’s degree, my honors degree from Berkeley. So I didn’t have to start from the very bottom, but I was in my first year at Rutgers. I was with first year students. They were very young and they were so darling. They were so beautifully self-absorbed. They gave me the gift.

of self-absorption. That’s hard for women. It’s hard for adult women to be totally self-absorbed. And these kids, everything that happened to them was so exciting and it was so wonderful or it so awful. Nothing had ever been like this before. Drama. It was so refreshing. 

Tricia Burt 

You know, I loved how you said that you were surprised that your otherness in art school was you being old. Yeah. For me, my otherness was I had a corporate life outside. So they looked at me like, well, you’re kind of the devil. It took me a while but then we seamlessly integrated. I also loved it when you were saying like, all your achievements you had out there made no difference to people in art school.

Nell Painter 

No difference at all. No. When I got, when my book The History of White People got the cover review of the New York Times book review, it’s like every writer’s fondest dream, their greatest ambition. And it was nothing.

Tricia Burt  

There was also kind of a freedom to go, well, all those labels and all those things out there don’t matter in here. What matters in here is am I making art? That’s the only thing that matters here. Am I making art? Am I learning this craft? Am I doing this? It was kind of humbling, a little humbling.

Nell Painter 

Yeah, but also your art school, I think, was a better art school than my art schools. I’m hesitating here because in my very first year, I did learn some crafts. But since when I was in art school, craft skill was kind of looked down on. 

Tricia Burt  

Now, when I say honing your craft, I kind of mean that broadly because it was an interesting time at the museum school as well. I really enjoyed your conversation about drawing from the nude figure and how everything sort of led to drawing the nude figure because I am horrible at it. But I have a really good use of line. And so when you were talking about your use of line, you were geared to doing this because you’ve done research your whole life and asking questions. I was not particularly skilled at asking questions. And so what art school did for me is allow me to ask a lot of questions.

Nell Painter 

Good, very good.

Tricia Burt  

You had a couple teachers say some pretty shitty things.

Nell Painter 

Yeah, I have lived such a long time. I was born in 1942, so I have lived a long time and a lot of that life, half of that life was in the, pardon my language, fucking 20th century. And in the fucking 20th century, a person in my body, not only a female body, a black body, but a dark skinned black body, I could not be anybody. Even when I was a full professor, there were people who I could tell that they just knew I couldn’t be anybody. And whatever I wrote could not be interesting. So I learned very early not to, I mean, I’m saying I learned very early not to see myself through other people’s eyes, which is the lesson that I end Old in Art school with.

But I have not always been able to apply that lesson to myself. But I try and I know that it’s a lesson I need to keep applying every day. And that was when I was glad to be old because I knew that was bullshit. I had been a teacher, I had been a grown up. I knew you don’t talk to students like that. And I have told that story many times and every time I tell it to an artist, they will say, I heard that and I thought it was true and I quit. Or I know somebody, even white men, who heard that and who quit because they thought that teacher was right. It’s just devastating.

Tricia Burt  

It is devastating and we need as many artists out there as we can. And so the idea is to just nurture them and move them. I mean, you and I both know when we hear criticism that is authentic and coming from a good, you feel it. You may not want to hear it, but you can hear it and you get better. But just stuff to say, Nell, you’re never going to be an artist. I mean, that’s founded on what? You know, that’s just alot of bullshit.

Nell Painter 

It’s just bullshit.

Tricia Burt  

Yeah. You know, I love the fact that you have proven them wrong.

Nell Painter 

I think so.

Tricia Burt  

I think one of the things about being an artist is resilience. One of the things that you referred to is just the staying power. If you stay in it, eventually you will be recognized. You know, eventually.

Nell Painter 

No, it depends on what you call recognition. I mean, just an infinitesimal percentage of working artists are recognized with a big R as, international artists or New York artists, people who sell their art. I mean, how many, what proportion of visual artists can live off their art? You know, it’s like zero.

Tricia Burt  

It is zero.

Nell Painter 

So if you’re going to keep making your art, you have to have some source of support. And whenever I talk about art, I remind people this is not just about your talent or your skill or what you can do that nobody else can do. It’s also about having the material, wherewithal, to do your work. And I was able to go to two art schools because I have a husband who supported me and I can continue this life on two tracks, making art and I do sell my art, but I don’t sell enough to pay my rent, my studio rent, not by a long shot. So I had to have other sources of support and I did. I was very fortunate in that way. One of the reasons I think that aspiring artists should start in community college is so that they don’t waste their money trying to find themselves.

Tricia Burt  

Yeah, yeah, because it is a lot of money. Well, and even just becoming an artist, I started not framing my work because I couldn’t afford the frames. I’m like, OK, we’re going to install this in a different way because I can’t afford it. And a lot of the times working against those parameters make you more creative. I mean, I’ve had a lot of financial parameters so that made me, I did some of my most creative work working with used tea bags. They were free and I lived in Ireland. They were everywhere. I mean, those parameters can force you to be more creative, but it’s very difficult to create when you have a revenue gun to your head. It’s very difficult to create when you know, you’re building up a student debt that’s going to be almost impossible to pay back. I mean, artists are really solo entrepreneurs. You’re trying to make, and then you have to market, you have to do all these things at one time. It’s tricky to find out what that balance is. So where is your studio? You mentioned you have a studio. Where is it?

Nell Painter 

My husband and I now live in East Orange, which is the suburb right next to Newark. We live in an old, from the 50s, large co-op building. So, we put together two apartments and we live in one part and my studio is in the other part. That’s fabulous. Well, it’s kind of fabulous, but it also leaks.I am actually with my upstairs neighbors who have been very helpful and supportive because there are workmen in my place, you know, scraping away the ruined plaster from the leaks.

Tricia Burt  

I’m interested in your process. Yes, do you have a place to write and is that a different space from where you make your visual work?

Nell Painter 

No, it’s the same space. I made some art that didn’t go anywhere for the Atlantic. So I had to make that art in part of the large room with the tables. And then when it comes time to write, and so I just switched back over. We were away in Germany for half the year, so nothing happened. And then coming back, I have to rejigger that space to write, which was a big deal.

Tricia Burt  

Yeah. And the writing is more the historian in you writing.

Nell Painter 

That’s right. Visual art made a difference in how I write and how I put together what becomes a book.

Tricia Burt  

I just have to tell you, and there’s an image in, I just keep talking. It’s the skeleton drawing. It just makes me, it makes me tingle all over.

Nell Painter 

My editor wanted that to be the cover image.

Tricia Burt  

I love that image. First off, to our listeners, need to get her recent book, I Just Keep Talking, a Life in Essays. Her artwork is sprinkled all through it. And the image I’m talking about is the one that comes with the introduction, and it’s just exquisite.

Nell Painter 

And that’s a tall piece. It’s taller than life size

Tricia Burt  

I’m like, holy moly, it’s over six feet. It’s beautiful, Nell, it’s beautiful.

Nell Painter 

I’m glad you like it. Thank you, Trisha.

Tricia Burt  

We’ll get back to the second half of our conversation in a moment, but right now I want to tell you about our sponsor, Interabang Books, a Dallas-based independent bookstore with a terrific online collection. At Interabang, their dedicated staff of book enthusiasts will guide you on your search for knowledge and the excitement of discovery. Shop their curated collection online at interabangbooks.com. That’s Interabang, www.interabangbooks.com

How do you choose your materials? I loved your description of going into an art store and what it makes you feel like.

Nell Painter 

Very sexy.

Tricia Burt  

I mean, it’s like, how much can I get? I mean, you just want to just take it all in and go make stuff. Talk to me about how you choose your materials and what you work with.

Nell Painter 

It’s actually, it starts with space. So when I was at RISD, I had a nice big studio so I could make some big art. My first residency was in Newark at Galleria Aferro , an artist run space, which sadly no longer exists. And I had a huge studio downtown. And so I made really big paintings. But since that time, I’ve had to pay attention to space. When we lived in Newark in the Ironbound near the train station, I had a studio in the basement of the building, former industrial building, where we lived in a fourth floor loft, fourth floor walk-up loft. So I had space, but not, the ceiling was very low, so I couldn’t do big things in there. So the scale got smaller.  And then in 2022, we moved from that building.A developer put a behemoth in front of us and closed us in. But also it got tiresome walking up to the fourth floor. So we moved out here to East Orange to a wonderful building, I should say. But what that’s meant is that I now we live between East Orange and the Adirondacks. And I also do some of my artwork. I now do artist residencies. So the artwork in, I just keep talking, a lot of it I made at Yaddo and the organization of the book I made and documented at MacDowell. So I can’t carry around big stuff. So over the course of time, I have switched to working on paper and using inks and collage.

Tricia Burt  

I appreciate how life sort of dictates sometimes what materials we’re going to use. Alll of my work is works on paper. To me, there’s nothing better than a wonderful heavy sheet of paper and a really sharp pencil and everything. I really enjoyed the reading about your instructor who gave you the assignment, 100 drawings.

Nell Painter 

Yeah.

Tricia Burt 

And I loved the images, even though there were only 67, which I also love just as much. Just the scale of them, there’s a really beautiful sensibility to those drawings. Does it help you to have assignments like that, even though you haven’t been in art school in years? Do you give yourself assignments like that?

Nell Painter 

Not like that. Nobody’s asked me this question before, so let me put it through the mill. So for instance, for the new Sojourner Truth book, I know that I will be making new art. So you could say that’s an assignment because it will be art that goes with a theme, Sojourner Truth. I told you that visual art has changed the way I write too and the way I put books together.

So for instance, in 2022, I visited the Hudson Valley and I took some photographs. So before I got visual, I would write this book just using words, I think. But now I’m going to include my own photographs on Route 32. So I will put myself in and my own images and I will be making drawings to go with this new book as well.

Tricia Burt 

How does that feel to you?

Nell Painter 

I love it. 

Tricia Burt  

What do you love about it?

Nell Painter 

It’s constraining in a way that it doesn’t make for scary freedom. So I don’t have to sit down and think, what am I going to do? So I know, for instance, that I’m going to work on a fairly small format because I work back and forth between the hand and the computer, and so I use a scanner. So I’m not going to be able to make stuff that’s really big that won’t fit on the scan. And I am going to keep in mind not before I make the drawings, but as I make the selection of drawings that will reproduce. 

Tricia Burt 

Yeah, okay, yeah. That’s smart

Nell Painter

I mentioned the drawings that I made for the Atlantic that didn’t get used, and part of it was that they wanted illustrations and I was making things that were too painterly. Even though I was drawing them, they were too complicated. They were original, but that’s not what was needed at the time. So all these things will go into scale. I will use probably inks because I’ve been using inks and I enjoy that. I will do digital collage and I will do things that I can carry around in my Subaru.

Tricia Burt  

You know Dan Hurlin, he was one of my guests on the podcast and our conversation was there is freedom in constraint. And he made one of his first puppet shows had to fit into a trunk that he could carry around. I think that those things if not, it’s too big how do you even start? What do you even do? You have to have some constraints to say it’s this, it’s going to be like this. I also loved in your book, I just keep talking, the, um, I knit socks for Adrienne. There’s so much about knitting the socks for Adrienne. And what was so funny is when you said that you were coming out, I was like the next word, I was not expecting to be knitter.

Nell Painter 

Yes!

Tricia Burt  

Like I was… I thought it was going to be something more salacious. I didn’t know what I was expecting but not knitter.

Nell Painter 

You’re right!

I live a very unsolacious life, but I did feel like I was coming out as a knitter. And the responses to that have been very good. And now when I talk about the new Sojourner Truth, I’ll give you the title, Sojourner Truth was a New Yorker and she didn’t say that, that’s the title. But there will be a chapter on Sojourner Truth’s knitting. And everybody goes, that’s wonderful.

Tricia Burt  

It is wonderful. And even your drawings in the, I just keep talking. I think you drew them while you were at MacDowell. I know they’re yellow images and you have the balls of yarn. Those are exquisite. So I love, I love this, how it’s like the history and the knitting and the drawing. It’s like all coming together. It’s really impressive.

Nell Painter 

That’s my yarn. That’s what the art turn did for me. And I will make a confession to you, Tricia. I have two addictions that I cannot control. If you are a knitter, you will understand that one of them is yarn. And since you’re an artist, you will understand the other one is ink. Pen ink.

I have so many bottles of so many different blues, so many different blacks.

Tricia Burt  

But doesn’t it make you so happy?

Nell Painter 

Yeah, so when I was in Germany, the last thing I needed was fountain pen ink. But I was a little bit blocked in my work, and I would sit in my study, and I would go to paper stores and I would buy ink. And so I brought back six bottles of ink, which mostly duplicate bottles I have here in New Jersey, but each one is ever so slightly different. I just can’t resist.

Tricia Burt  

Yeah, yeah, no, okay. There are a lot worse addictions that you could have now. I think those are good addictions. Those are really good addictions. I want to talk to you a little bit about because I’ve mentioned this before we got together on this interview. So I’m a woman without children. You’re a woman without children. There’s been a lot of talking about women without children. It was a combination of  choice and circumstance with us not having children. But my biggest thing was I don’t have a blueprint. Like I’m okay with not being a mother, but I don’t really have a blueprint. What is this supposed to look like? How am I supposed to do this? So I love to talk to other women and now it makes perfect sense that we didn’t have children and I have a rich full life and it’s great. But in that moment it was like, what is this supposed to look like? I was mostly bewildered, but looking for who else can I follow here? And what is this, what can this look like? So I just kind of wanted to ask you about your experience and how that felt for you.

Nell Painter 

Well, since you asked me, I did think about it and I have a three-part answer. But the first thing I thought about, I mean, the last thing I thought about, because it only came to me as you were talking about role model and blueprint, which I did not have. I’m the wrong kind of black person.

I’m from California. I didn’t grow up poor. My parents were married until my mother died, so they were married like for 74 years. And I’m not Southern. So I have never felt…like someone who could look to role models. So I didn’t miss that. I didn’t miss that at all. So that’s the part I hadn’t thought about until you spoke about that. What I did think, I thought of three things. One was that as I am an old person, I’m a 20th century person, and when I was marriageable age, to most of the black men in my world wanted, that is to say, educated, middle class, not poor, they wanted light-skinned wives. So if you look around at the marriages and people of my generation and my class, you will see men of many skin colors, but their wives are always light-skinned. So being a dark-skinned woman meant that I was at a discount in the marriage market, and I would never have had children without being married. The second thing has to do with my family.

There’s a photograph early in, I just keep talking, of my parents when I am in utero with my brother. My brother died when he was five and I was an infant. I never knew him. As I say and I just keep talking, I don’t understand how my parents could keep going. But they did. And I read once in scholarly literature, that surviving children sometimes either desperately want children or desperately don’t want children. I was neither of those. I remember one time in North Carolina, a friend of mine, her children were just getting, you know, sort of late teens, early twenties when you can talk to them. And they had such a nice relationship. And I thought, wouldn’t that be lovely? That was the only time I ever really missed having children. So I didn’t feel either way. But I suspect that my brother’s death did influence my approach or my non-approach to being a mother. The third thing is not having, again, in my generation, so I got my PhD in 1974, and I remember so many women, white women even, who got their PhDs, mine is from Harvard, theirs were, you know, from very respectable places, but there was so much misogyny in academia that they just got thrown out and I think if I had had to juggle motherhood with that kind of a professional realm, it would have been really, really hard. So I know women in my generation who, as mothers, just could not do both. So I think I need to, I don’t know if credit is the word, but recognize my childlessness as part of my productivity.

Tricia Burt  

And I think that’s a fabulous way to put that because there’s only so much energy. I mean I really appreciated the part of your book when you’re going back and forth to California. I have a mother right now who’s in Florida who’s in pretty good shape, but she’s 94. There’s a lot of needs there. And so…you know, life is happening while we’re trying to make art and while we’re trying to, and it’s just, I am amazed at women who can do both. But I think you’re absolutely right that there is a lot of creative energy that can go other places that if you’re not raising children and that we leave a legacy in a different way. Thank you so much for answering that question.

Nell Painter

Yeah. Well, I’ve been very fortunate to be able to do what I love doing.

Tricia Burt  

So I have my one last question I to ask all of my guests. Where do you need courage right now?

Nell Painter 

The easy answer is to wake up and face the United States as it is now on a national level. Which is frightening. But I don’t think that is where I need courage because I have so many friends and fellow sister citizens who feel the way I do. I have plenty of company. So that’s not really a need of courage.

Tricia Burt  

Yes.

Nell Painter

Plus as a historian and someone who lives through a good deal of the 20th century, I feel like we’re in a 20th century time in its scariness. But also, so fascinating, the voyeur in me just can’t wait to see what’s going to happen.

Tricia Burt  

Is there a place though with you though in your creativity that you need courage? Is there a place right now of stuff you’re trying to make yourself that is daunting?

Nell Painter 

No, because I know I don’t have to keep everything I make. You know, the lesson that I learned at the studio school is you can erase it. You can cut it up and use it to make something different. You can throw it away.

Tricia Burt  

Absolutely. Yes. There’s a lot of beauty and cutting up a painting that didn’t work. It’s like, let’s make that into something else. Well, Nell I just want to thank you so much because again, the name of the show is No Time to Be Timid and you have done some very, I mean, starting over at 65, doing everything you did before 65. It’s just, a real honor to have you on the show and thank you so much for everything you’ve done.

Nell Painter 

Thank you, Tricia. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation. You asked me things that nobody’s ever asked me for, and that’s enjoyable to think about.

Tricia Burt 

Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you.

Nell clearly shows no sign of slowing down. She is an inspiration. And I love the subtitle of her book, A Memoir of Starting Over. I’ve done it several times in my life and she’s a great reminder to keep branching out and trying new things. In the meantime, here’s some questions to consider. Are you itching to start over? If so, where are you being called to explore? Who are your role models? And who are you a role model for? Are you letting others determine how you think of yourself? What constraints are working for you? And what are some of your healthy addictions that keep your creative well-filled? If you want to learn more about Nell, go to her website, NellPainter.com, and follow her on Instagram, at www.NellPainter. And if you haven’t already, make sure to download a copy of the No Time to Be Timid Manifesto by going to www.trisharoseburt.com slash manifesto.

Thanks for joining us. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us podcast@trisharoseburt.com. And if you liked this episode, please share it with one other person that you think will enjoy it. Then maybe talk to them about the parts that resonate. It really helps build our audience. And remember, this is no time to be timid.

No Time to Be Timid is written and produced by me, Trisha Rose Burt. Our episodes are produced and scored by Adam Arnone of Echo Finch. And our executive producers are Amy Grant, Nancy Perot, and Sage Wheeler. I’d also like to thank contributors to my Fractured Atlas Fiscal Sponsorship, which helps make this podcast happen. No Time to Be Timid is a presentation of I Will Be Good Productions.

You can change yourself and change the world It’s no time to be timid if you haven’t heard

You can find what’s true, that’s what you deserve. It’s no time to be timid if you haven’t heard.