Lawyers Then, Artists Now - Artful
Matisse was a lawyer. So was abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky.
Maybe it’s because I spent most of my life as a lawyer and law professor, now writer about the arts, that I find myself bumping up against people who have chosen a similar path. Or maybe the constraints of law practice causes one to yearn for the freedom of making art. Not sure . . .
Elliot Burg (Middlesex, Vermont), former legal aid lawyer and law professor, retired from a position in the Vermont Attorney General’s office several years ago and is now a photographer. His works have been featured widely; local showings have included galleries at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and public art on the streets of Montpelier. He notes both similarities and differences in the two careers:
“In 2015, after 37 years in public interest law, I pivoted to a second career as a freelance photographer, focusing on candid portraiture, in the U.S.and abroad. In some ways, the two callings involved similar skill sets--particularly the emphasis on narrative and the desire to have an impact. In other ways, I found law and art to be very different, respectively stressing logic versus emotion and planning versus spontaneity. At the start, and in the end, it was the freedom to express my feelings about the world that drew me to photography.”
Gus Speth, (Strafford, Vermont) longtime environmental lawyer and activist, author of the recent book They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis, and former professor at Vermont Law School, said: “I cannot say that I left VLS to take up writing poetry, but that is in effect what happened. I now have generated four books of poems, plus another book going to press soon.” And in stressing the non-commercial aspect of his art, Speth added “I have recently put all my poems online,” even as he questions what to call them:
Every so often someone asks “is this really a poem?” It is a good question. Mostly, I have tried to write genuine poems. I love poems, at least the ones I can understand. But every once in a while, I give up and just say it the way that comes easily. Thus the subtitle – Poems and Such. Efforts like mine in these cases have been called ventilated prose. They incorporate certain poetic features, but in the end fall short of the real thing. An example is “State of the Union,” which I like very much.”
Not surprisingly, some of Speth’s poems reflect his concern for the environment, and current politics. But there are many poems with more tender observations: of children on a beach, beloved dogs in “We Have Rules!”, (“ . . . They greet us each morning/with happy tails, and grins/that say we want to play. They love to snuggle in our bed; we let them lie there on our legs, when there should be a rule instead.”, aging, and in “Passing Days,” love that abides. ( “. . . I said, please bare with me, and she did that evening.”)
Coralea Wennberg (Hanover, New Hampshire) studied law when women lawyers were still a rare phenomenon. After working at Dartmouth College and Vermont Law School for a decade or so, she “took a wonderful water color class taught by Gary Hamel and decided that if I wanted to become a “real” painter I’d have to paint full time. It still amazes me that I was brave enough to quit the job I had worked so hard for—but there was something about the creative experience of drawing and painting that I had to have in my life.”
Wennberg has been painting for more than thirty years. Her work was recently featured in an exhibition called Plant Stories at AVA Gallery. Of her painting of a local barn (photo, top) she says: “This barn is just up the road, near the corner of River Rd. and N. Thetford Rd. in Lyme. I like painting in my neighborhood, and I like this painting because the barn is a huge structure which dominates the landscape in that area and I wanted the barn to have that solidity and dominance in the painting and I think I got it.”
Postscript: Beyond the present day and the Upper Valley, other lawyers who left the law (or the study thereof) for art include: musician Paul Simon , John Cleese of Monty Python, opera singer Andrea Boccelli, documentary film producer Frederick Wiseman, Francis Scott Key, and the NYT crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz. Sir Walter Scott’s first career was as a criminal defense lawyer.
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And in case you are wondering . . . Susan B. Apel shuttered a lifelong career as a law professor to continue an interest (since kindergarten) in writing. Her freelance business, The Next Word, includes literary and feature writing; her work has appeared in a variety of lit mags and other publications including Art New England, The Woven Tale Press, The Arts Fuse, and Persimmon Tree. She connects with her neighbors through Artful, her blog about arts and culture in the Upper Valley. She’s in love with the written word.
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