The art of the deal(ing) with it all

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

The first time Donald Trump assumed the presidency of the United States, I quit my job as editor of Boise Weekly, we sold our house on the Boise Bench and moved to Pullman, Wash., where I enrolled in graduate school. That sounds like a pretty dramatic response, but I just couldn’t suffer being a journalist working in such a malignant political climate — and I came to the conclusion that because I couldn’t understand what had just happened, I needed to return to American history for an explanation.

That’s another story. More interesting (to me, anyway) is, at the same time as my flight from journalism in the time of Trump, I started picking up hobbies. I bought a telescope and played around with backyard astronomy, picked up archery and even tried my hand at raising Venus flytraps. Among those random pastimes, I had the weird inclination to sculpt.

Joseph Conrad by Zach Hagadone.

In a heroic example of procrastination and avoidance, one Saturday in the autumn of 2017 I spent about an hour studying sculpting techniques on YouTube, then another hour or so researching brands of clay and tools, followed by identifying where I could buy them and journeying as far afield as Moscow to secure the necessary supplies.

Ultimately, I sat down at the dining room table and set to work sculpting a bust of Joseph Conrad — most famous for writing Heart of Darkness. It didn’t turn out too bad (see above), so I did another little bust of Edgar Allan Poe. Then I did Daniel Defoe (author of Robinson Crusoe and regarded as the first “journalist” in the English-speaking world). I busted out a bust of John Steinbeck and, inexplicably, haven’t sculpted since.

I thought about that the other day when my wife, kids and I were at a book store in Coeur d’Alene, where for some reason I bought a travel-sized watercolor painting kit. I have not painted, much less watercolored, since elementary school; yet, I felt a powerful urge to try it out. 

According to an article from the National Institutes of Health titled “How Times of Crisis Serve as a Catalyst for Creative Action,” “creative activities during times of crisis can lead to outcomes that are judged to be new and meaningful, even if those outcomes are experienced on a more subjective level and temporary time scale.”

That tracks for me. Looking back, I started my political cartooning career in earnest with the campaign and election of George W. Bush. I kept that up all through Bush’s two terms, and even into Barack Obama’s administration, but kind of fell away from it a few years before the advent of Trump.

Now here I am watercoloring. 

We saw a similar phenomenon during the COVID-19 pandemic, when homebound people flocked to hobbies like gardening and accumulating house plants, cooking and baking, doing jigsaw puzzles and buying coloring books for adults. The market for paper products surged during the pandemic; according to Midland Paper, printed books saw a 777% in sales in the first month of the pandemic, while market sectors such as puzzles, coloring books and workbooks for all ages rose 200%.

There are most certainly worse ways than creativity to cope with feelings of doom, moments of crisis and the processing of trauma — all of which many of us will experience in exponential intensity over the next four years. As a lapsed editorial cartoonist, erstwhile sculptor and (so far) untalented watercolorist, I submit that we may be better off if we seek at least some refuge in art, rather than dread, resignation and despair. Call it “the art of the deal(ing) with it all.”