Astrid Dick

October 6th, 2017

Astrid in her studio

I just got back from visiting a good friend from many years ago, Astrid Dick.  She finished her Ph.D. in economics at MIT a few years after me and had a successful career, first at the New York Fed and then as a professor at INSEAD.  Then her life took an unexpected turn.  She found she had a compulsion to do art which she could not repress or even satisfy as a hobby.  She had, in fact, been painting in her spare time for years, even keeping a studio in Queens when she lived in New York.  She took a sabbatical from INSEAD to explore her art, and decided that she would not go back.

I visited her studio in the 20th, and we talked about hair, MIT, tea, economics, birthdays, and families.  Perhaps most interesting for me, though, was our discussions about the artistic process and parallels between that and doing economics research.  She talked about how academic research prepared her psychologically for the process she engaged in when painting, the uncertainty and unexpected turns it entailed.  She talked about the intellectual challenge of producing a painting, how she sometimes saw it as an impossibly difficult puzzle to solve.  She talked about her frustration with how some of contemporary art seems not to be about discovery but rather about knowing the truth before one begins.  And, of course, I thought about how performing research with a particular answer or agenda in mind produces the worst kind of research.

I don't want to draw out the analogy too far.  Academic research is not art.  We talked about the different roles collaboration serves in both.  Also, she touched on how important expression and self-discovery were in her drive to make art. These are not the motivating forces in my economics research.  (Discovery is certainly part of it, but not self-discovery.  I think for me, the motivation is the intellectual challenge of having a hard problem, thinking deeply about it, coming up with some sort of solution, imperfect as it may be.)  We discussed the relationship between the author and reader of an economics paper and the relatively thick buffer that the structure of a research paper provides.  Then she contrasted that with the thinnest of membranes that a piece of art provides between the artist and those viewing it.    

I felt like I learned some about how different her life is from mine by spending an afternoon in her studio, but also how it's similar in some unexpected ways.

I look forward to renewing our friendship this year and learning a lot more about being an artist.  I hope you enjoy these photos of her studio.  Here is her website:  http://astriddick.com/