Category Archives: The Arts

Inspiration is for Amateurs or The Olympic Sculpture Park

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When was the last time you launched?  Naomi found this sand bag game board at the Olympic Sculpture Park.  I tried it too.  They had spring and getting air is as good now as when I was ten.

Inside the museum there were a half dozen art projects to choose from.  This is the rubber salmon print workshop.  The prints were to be turned into flags as part of “The Salmon are Returning” celebration.

Happens that Richard Serra was on Charlie Rose last night talking about creativity with Chuck Close, Ann Tempkin, Eric Kandel and Oliver Sacks. It was Episode 12 of the Brain Series.

Have to make a segue here.  Did you know that both Oliver Sacks (Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat) and Chuck Close (painter of massive flat visages) are face blind?  On Charlie Rose, they shared their work-arounds.

The jelly in the brain never ceases to amaze me.

Face blind (prosopagnosia) means that you can chat with them for an hour and then walk up fifteen minutes later and unless they hear your voice or recognize your hat, they’ll have no idea who you are.  Imagine how hard it would be for them to follow the plot of a film. When it comes to art and science and creativity they never stop…this handicap has caused their brains to develop massive spacial capabilities, honed their memories and most of all, given them an intense drive to discover other venues for their intelligence.

Chuck said, “Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.  By doing the work you are put in a place where things can happen.”  He also said, “Far more interesting than problem solving is problem creation.”

 

Yes I did try to explain the face blindness to Simone and Naomi and they flippantly surmised that these guys would be really bad at playing the Hasbro game “Guess Who?”

The girls were much more interested in running around the five towering components of “Wake” and before long they had gathered a few new friends to play hide and seek with.

27…28…29…and 50.  Ready or not, here I come.

Hide and Seek…I found you Simone.  

Guess who is playing the Sculpture Park!  The Recess Monkeys!  Daron, Jack and Andrew have a new album called Flying.  The youthful crowd is lining up in the mosh pit.  Wonder if any of the recess monkeys ever crowd surf their audience?

Back to the launch pad.  We try to think “Baryshnikov” and just “stay up there.”

Nobody gets out of here alive

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The summer after high school, I enrolled in a choreography workshop with Bill T Jones and Arnie Zane (Arnie was alive then) and Lucinda Childs at Harvard University.  It was intense. Dawn till dusk, we created and brainstormed about one another’s work.

We were asked to explain what we were trying to do. “Change the world, of course!  Solve the big problems!”  As you can see this was not my strong point.  They meant specifically what was this particular dance trying to do?  Hmm…Not easy to answer.  We were asked to map out in detail how we were going to make our next dance.  My answer was “futz and experiment with things for a while until I feel I’m onto something powerful.”   I got the feeling the preferred answer involved setting up tasks and processes.  So, I was starting to wonder.  Where exactly was my strong point?  Did I have a strong point?  We were asked why we wanted to make a dance?  Okay…I’m starting to get it.  I want to make a dance to communicate and take the audience from here to there.  Then we were asked whether our dance had worked?  I decided to interview my audience and what I discovered was that they got something wildly different from what I thought I was communicating.  Does that mean that my pieces were too vague?   I decided to add words, text, storytelling, football teams, rock bands, forklifts and the kitchen sink.  I just was going to craft the hell out of the pieces.  It started to work but it took years of exploring to put it all together.  By raising the bar on us, we developed a furious drive to ensure the art was working on our audience.

We spent days upon days on theme and variation, composition, execution, illusion, purpose, memory, passion, running a dance company, inspiring dancers, inspiring ourselves and being fiscally literate and ethically responsible artists. (Not the average summer dance camp.)  I was fifteen, eager and excited, and those 6 heavy weeks in Cambridge calibrated us young choreographers for much more than just the life of an artist.

Thank you Bill.  Thank you Arnie.  Thank you Lucinda.

Here is Bill T Jones on Being an Artist.

and “Blind Date,” a dance.

First Thursday Art Walk in May

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Seemed like a long time since we’d enjoyed the First Thursday art walk.   Off we went to Occidental Square where we checked in on Davidson Gallery and the Lawrimore Project and then we circled round to visit Greg Kucera and Gail Gibson.  There were other wonderful shows to see but the girls were leading the way and outspoken when it came to deciding whether to go in or not.

We ran across a red furry hammer and a knitted creature who were trying to get into the Gail Gibson gallery. The girls decided to help and suggested they lie flat and we carry them in coffin style but the creatures would have none of that!

We spent the rest of the evening drawing potential Halloween costumes. Naomi loved the Nick Cave exhibit at SAM and wanted to go in that direction. She wants something she can dance in that has auxiliary movement…hairy stuff that floats and shakes as she described it. Simone wants to create a doctor that is an animal in a doctor outfit holding a birdcage with a person in it. Best get the sewing machine out pronto!

The Artist Toolbox – NOW for Season Two!

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With each week, we become more popular!  The Artist Toolbox is now running 2 to 4 times a week in 227 PBS markets.  We were the LA Times “Pick of the Week” again (fifth time) as well as covered in Time and Newsweek.  We have the right to distribute outside of PBS and thus are putting the 13 episodes on airline inflight entertainment (digiplayer has us now) and soon you will be able to download us from Amazon’s Instant Video.

Watch the full Isabel Allende episode below or with this link.

My focus now is on finding underwriting for Season Two.  We have Helen Mirren, Angela Lansbury, Bon Jovi, David Brubeck, Carolina Herrera, Jules Feiffer and Sally Mann lined up …so far.

There are two 30 sec ad spots in the show. Those spots are powerful, as PBS is a clutter and competition-free advertising environment. The ad that runs before Charlie Rose is forever etched in my mind…the boy opens the mailbox and there is the bottle of Coke.  I had an idea, that it would be really something to run ads of the great sculpture parks, museums and other art venues. It would be a way of bridging the stories of creativity to the first-person experience of being in front of great art.