The Blessing of Limited Means

I’m writing in a moment of extreme heat in the Northeast United States. Such weather affects how I manage my type 1 diabetes and makes the brain foggy. That distraction made writing this essay a bit of a slog, and the result feels like a bit of a jumble. But a good essay doesn’t lay everything out. The writer points in a direction and hopes the reader will follow. They’ll tell you soon enough if they can’t—or aren’t interested.

So let me know. :)

Käthe Kollwitz, a German artist whose drawings and lithographs detailed the suffering of women and children during both world wars, was also a mother and a doctor’s wife. She discovered the woodcuts of Ernst Barlach some months before her youngest son, Peter, died in the early months of the First World War. The graphic power of Barlach’s prints inspired her to work in the medium.

Die Eltern (The Parents) is one in a series of extraordinary woodcuts showing the universal agony of loosing a child to war. Kollwitz developed a vital, muscular drawing style that expressed a righteous rage as well as boundless grief.

She distilled images to bare essentials—stripped them of specific references and details, in favor of depicting universal cycles of loss and mourning.

Kollwitz once mused that unlimited creative time was not as focused and productive as the precious minutes of art-making wedged between parenting and working in a wartime clinic with her doctor husband. As she grew older she mused,

The hands work and work, and the head imagines it is producing God knows what; and yet formerly, in my so wretchedly limited working time, I was more productive because I was more sensual; I lived as a human being must live, passionately interested in everything. ~Käthe Kollwitz

When my sons were young, I was an illustrator and visual artist, and when I went into my studio during naps I had limited time to work, and constraint fueled an urgency to be productive in the time available. There was no time to play with every color, medium or support, so I worked with a limited palette, and that austerity was an unexpected blessing. When the sleeping child woke and creative time ended, I was satisfied, and surprised that I was.

You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery and you create a feeling of strength in reserve. ~Picasso

Strength in reserve seems absurd in a culture that demands we give the utmost and more in every arena of life. Work hard, play harder; parent better, and be your very best self always. But imagine a world where you work below your means and handle the things you choose to do with mastery, knowing there’s a reservoir of strength in reserve you can always draw from.

I’m a fan of restraint and minimalism. Of the spare and unadorned. But synonyms for austere—severe, harsh, unfeeling, stoney, steely, reserved, remote, aloof—show we don’t have a friendly regard for working with less, owning less, or giving less.

My love of the austere comes, I’m sure, from dour and flinty Scottish ancestors. I’ve also lived for years with the unfortunate flip side of seeing the world through a glass half empty, but when I’m not worrying and fearful, flailing around in lack, my heart is pierced by the grace of a teacup alone on a kitchen table.

Kollwitz and Picasso admired economy of means. Both distilled images to their essence. Both were highly skilled at using the most basic artistic implements: charcoal and crayon.

Picasso was wildly prolific, yet seemed to constantly practice reducing images to their essence, and endless iterations in almost every artistic form—paint, ceramics, prints and collage—blossomed from that mastery of simplicity.

I remember walking into an museum gallery filled with masterful drawings and prints but a small ink drawing on the far wall caught my eye. Picasso. Five effortless lines of a bird caught for a moment mid-flight.

You can be creative only when there is abandonment-which means, really, there is no sense of compulsion, no fear of not being, of not gaining, of not arriving. Then there is great austerity, simplicity, and with it there is love. ~Krishnamurti

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NOTE: I write from the perspective of a white cisgender woman—I have a safe, stable place to live and a car. I have type 1 diabetes but am otherwise healthy. (At the moment) I have reliable healthcare. I am always supported and loved by family and friends.