It’s taken me months to get around to cleaning my desk. I’ve just chucked things into the back of it, and they’ve accumulated in tectonic layers. I have a general sense where important things are and can root around in the heap and eventually find them. There’s a letter rack back there on the left and my drawing book, watercolors and favorite pens tend to be stacked somewhere on the front left. My color theory homework tends to be somewhere in the back right, there are second-string pens unsorted in cups and jars somewhere in the back and my Wacom tablet’s there too, I think. My passport is in one of the top drawers and the charger for my camera is probably in the second drawer from the top, underneath. The other 90% of the stuff is just an undistinguished mass. Loads of things have just disappeared into the swamp unlabeled, un-databased, unremembered, and I forget they ever existed.
I’ll take some or even most of the blame. Other factors: Patti’s desk tends to accumulate junk at a far faster rate and regularly disappears under the enormous pile like the Collier Brother’s dining table. The other factor is that my cool teak 1950’s Swedish desk is just to damned small. It’s just 40″ across . Once my laptop is opened and room cleared for the mouse, I have barely enough room to plant my elbows on either side. It’s basically impossible to draw at, so I use my lap and balance my paints on the corner.
Before Jack was born, we went shopping for a house in the country, an idle sort of thing, with no real conviction behind it. The place I remember best was an early 19th century place that belonged to an 80-year old widow, somewhere near Connecticut. Her husband had been an illustrator and we were shown into his spectacular studio with loads of room for drawing tables and easels and leather chairs and various tables still set with his cans of brushes and pens. It had an enormous floor-to-ceiling window, a good twenty feet high, looking out into the garden and the forest beyond which flood the studio with light.
I mentioned that memory to Patti a few months ago (it had prompted me to write an essay called “Art Supply porn” ) and she though that maybe we could do something to give our own apartment more of that feeling. After all, we rarely have people over to sit in all of our arm chairs and eat at our dining table maybe once a month. Most of the time the place is piled high with half-finished projects and games and musical instruments and stuffed dead animals. The decor is still pretending we have some sort of normal life we never actually had. So one of these days we will move out credenzas and knicknacks and move in drawings tables and flat files and the like.
In the meantime, I have to deal with this reality. So I set to straightening my desk on Sunday morning. I sorted drawings projects into individual manilla envelopes, labeled some boxes and files and sorted through the papers I didn’t toss, and uncovered a handful things I would have bet money that I’d never owned or even seen before:
– A Superman-in-chains rubber stamp
– An unopened 2 oz. bottle of black sumi ink
– A badge from the Webelos with three woven ribbons studded with 12 pins depicting a car, a ghost, gears, the constitution,a palette, a swimmer, a mountain and various other doodads
– My grandmother’s hammer/tool kit
– A pin from a Peruvian restaurant called Bajo el Puente
– One left brown glass eye in a case
– A box of linoleum carving tools
– The Speedy Stitcher® sewing awl
– An unused box of 24 Conté crayons
I used the last item to draw an ‘After’ picture. I don’t think I’ve used them before. A little smudgy but they have a distinctive chalky feeling I quite like. I sprayed the whole deal with stinky fixative afterwards, hoping that would keep it from mucking up my journal and my nice clean desk.
Category: Ideas
Big and small.
I contain multitudes
I am a wiry cowboy or maybe an ex-con, sideburned, sunburned, sheathed in jailhouse tats, wearing Dickies, Vitalis and Old Spice, a hand-roll dangling below my Fu-Manchu, stonily silent, a solid peckerwood who’s 1000-yard-staring through glacial blue eyes.
I am Robert DeNiro as Vito Corleone in Godfather II. Poised, determined, resourceful, lethal.
I am Aimee Mann: thin, blonde, beautiful; cynical, hilarious,profane; part angel, part construction worker.
I am Eminem.
I am Miles.
I am Tyson.
I am the Dalai Lama.
I am Jimi Hendrix: my fingers scrabbling and singing across the strings, my cheeks sucked in, my eyes closed, my shirt a riot of psychedelic paisley.
I am Steve McQueen, leaping the barbed wire fence into Switzerland on the back of a stolen German motorbike.
I am Francis Bacon.
I am Warren Buffett.
I am Jesus Christ.
I am Keith Richards: kohl eyes, turtle skin, brown bony arms gripping my axe.
I am Curtis, holding a piece of cardboard and a cup on Sixth Avenue.
I am Vincent in the wheat field.
I am Arnold, winning Mr. Olympia yet again.
I am Henry Miller, fingering in Clichy, scribbling in Brooklyn.
I am Dy Thomas, blowing a fag end into a BBC mike.
I am a spotty fourteen-year-old with a meager moustache.
I am a bloated middle-aged bald man.
I am a corpse.
I am Chas Eames.
I am Dick Feynman.
I am Wally Whitman.
—
Last night I was thinking about how hard it is to stay in my own skin. Maybe that’s the way art is supposed to make you feel, to catapult you into another aspect of yourself and let you dwell there a while. Or maybe that’s just what it is to be human and to try to live an examined life.
I’m reacting intensely to all of the things I am going through right now, all of the different audiences I seem to be strutting past. I want to’ be me’, to express that me-ness, and yet it is so varied, so contradictory. There’s me as husband, father, son, and brother. Illustrator, author, blogger, copywriter, professional, and novice. Teacher, student, know-it-all, and idiot. Ad guy, art-guy, ugly American guy, and Registered Alien. Jew, Christian, Buddhist, and atheist. Hermit, tireless self-promoter, success, and failure.
It’s not really that I’m seeking the answer any more. My adolescence is so far behind me, and I have worn out my allotment of mid-life crises. It’s more that I’m perpetually restless, only temporarily satisfied with every conclusion.
Perhaps this is the biological imperative that moves successful organisms towards adaptation and evolution. Those who are content to keep chowing down on a certain kind of leaf or to hang out by a certain waterhole are secure … until the shit comes down. Then it’s only those shifty, scuttling rodents in the undergrowth that make it to the next level. We are the descendants of every successful shape shifter there’s been till now, the freakiest of all mutated freaks, and these days, as the shit comes down more heavily than ever, only the unsatisfiable will survive. So perhaps I’m working my way up to missing linkhood.
Or maybe I’ll just be the first lemming off the cliff.
Or worse yet, somewhere lost in the middle of the herd.
Homeless Journal
Recently, I found myself angsting about money. I decided that I should go out and talk to people who had none. I approached homeless people in my neighborhood and asked them to share their stories with me. At first it was terrifying, breaking the barrier. But I soon found that if you don’t want anything from people but their story and perspective, they are enormously forthcoming and trusting. They’ll soon forget to wonder why you’re asking.
These images and stories were published in the Morning News where my journal entires were transcribed into text.
All Quiet on the Artistic Front
Where’s Johnny Got his Gun? Where’s All Quiet on the Western Front? Where’s Catch 22? A Farewell to Arms and For whom the Bell Tolls? From Here to Eternity? The Naked and the Dead?
Where’s Guernica?
Where’s Alice’s Restaurant? Where’s All Along The Watchtower? Where’s Give Peace a Chance? Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy? We Gotta Get Out of This Place? Born in the USA? Rocking the Casbah?
Where’s The Star Spangled Banner?
It’s been three years since 9/11 and yet, (except for a couple of forgettable efforts from Springsteen and Bowie, a few made-for-TV movies, and Michael Moore’s upcoming Fahrenheit 911) artists don’t seem to have responded in a significant way that has caught on with the public. Where’s the first great anti-war hip hop song? The Whitney Biennial was great but if any of it referenced 9/11 and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, I missed it.
Granted, it may have taken a few years for great art to emerge from other wars, and so far no one’s been drafted for this one, but we live in accelerated times and all feel threatened and yet there doesn’t seem to even be a movement afoot. These events are changing our lives and our world, and people all over the planet seem to have strong feelings about it and yet, the music, film, fiction and art world seem way, way too peaceful.
Miles ahead
I’ve been reading about jazz recently, specifically about Miles and his seminal album, Kind of Blue. Miles was intensely committed to what he did, brave in a way I wonder if I can ever be. He seemed to live without doubt. At one point, he and the author had an argument about what day it was. When he was shown a copy of that day’s paper, proving he was wrong, he said, ” See that wall of awards? I got them for having a lousy memory.” He didn’t dwell on the past, didn’t repeat himself, did what he did and kept on forging ahead.
What keeps one so resolute? Miles was successful, rich by jazz standards, but he was derided for how he behaved. People thought him arrogant, racist, mysoginistic, and uncommunicative. He would often play with his back to the audience and never spoke on stage. I don’t believe he behaved this way because he could. I think he was just being uncompromisingly himself. That was the key to his art. He was an asshole, but that was okay with Miles.
How do you learn from a person like this? How do you follow his example in order to become purely yourself? Does it mean being unresponsive to any input, being pigheaded, selfish and rude? Of course not.
Miles believed in his art. His commitment was complete and he worked enormously hard on his technique and ideas. Even if he wasn’t right (and by and large he was), he could tell his inner and outer critics that he did his very best and that he had faith in that . Perhaps that’s the point of one’s life. To discover what one loves, to pursue it to the utmost of one’s ability, and then to gauge the success of one’s life by how purely one has done that, rather than by the criteria others set.
It can be a rough road. One can struggle to make a living. One can fail to get accolades or even support from others. Personally, I wouldn’t be satisfied with a life that offended and alienated the rest of the world but maybe I am just a pussy. Still, I think if you can sustain Miles-like focus on your art, your chances are good. Van Gogh spent a decade drawing crap, but he kept at it, and then suddenly blossomed.
I’m sure many people will say: “Are you telling me that if I work hard enough, I will succeed? And conversely, if I don’t achieve the heights, it will be due to my lack of sustained effort?” I don’t know. I don’t want to paint such a black and white picture. But I think focus and perseverance are critical. The thunderstruck artist, whacked by the muse, and suddenly a huge hit, is a myth. You’ve gotta practice and practice and practice to bore to your core. Then you’ve got to have the bravery to be unflinching about exposing that core. You’ve got to be smart, figuring out ways to share your work with different people who will give productive advice and help share your stuff with others. It helps to be lucky (whatever that means).
And I believe that a positive outlook is essential too. That takes work as well. I am often my own worst enemy, my inner critic baying at every shadow. I can wake up at 4 am and keep myself awake with horrible images of my ‘inevitable’ fall from grace. In my churning mind, my foolish ways destroy my family, my savings, my health, my promise. Instead of being a grownup, I am dabbling in feeble, artsy things. Unwilling to suck it up and just do my job as a man and a provider, I am indulging myself in crap like this blog.
But, when I wake up, exhausted from the assault, I try to get to work to paint a sunnier picture. The fact is, I have dealt with harder things than nightmares and nagging internal voices. And I have done that by being positive and proactive.
The future is a blank sheet. I can try to catapult shit at it but that’s just making the present uglier. And a long succession of ugly todays will lead to an ugly tomorrow. On the other hand, I can impact the future by believing in myself, by working hard, by staying the course, by confirming my directions with those who have already travelled it, by purifying my expectations and intentions, by keeping my chin up.
Maybe Miles wasn’t actually all that confident. Maybe that’s why he put shit in his arm and up his nose, why he raged and sulked. But I know he was positive about his art. If he hadn’t been, he would still have had all that doubt and stress. But he wouldn’t have Blues for Pablo and Bye Bye Blackbird. And nor would we.
John Hancock
When you’re designing a book that will be entirely handwritten, you have two choices. You can be as patient as Frederick Franck and get a bunch of pens and set to work, writer’s cramp be damned. If you are as inconsistent and sloppy as I am, better to follow SARK’s example and have a font created based on your handwriting. So when I made Everyday Matters, I worked with Alexander Walter to turn my vaguely cursive upper/lower case writing into a font.
The font worked well for the book but I was troubled by the fact that the point size is set by the height of the tallest letter, including descenders and ascenders. That meant I was also ways having to scale up the letters and that if I cranked down my leading, I would have letters from different lines bumping heads and tails.
Recently I decided to try a new one, based on my other style of handwriting, a printed uppercase face with slightly larger letters for caps. I wrote out the alphabet and all the punctuation and numbers, then copied out many surreal sentences like “You hope havoc and chaos will ebb when you tattoo a kiwi at the zoo” and “A yoga guru will hew the yucca with a hacksaw.” I made a high res scan of all this palaver and emailed it to Alexander and a couple of weeks later, he sent me a link so I could download the font. Alexander also gave me a macro that runs in Microsoft Word to randomize my text. This useful feature takes all of the variations on a given letter that I have printed and randomly substitutes them in to my text. Instead of the same exact Y, for instance, it will insert one with a longer tail, an angled shaft, uneven tines, etc. This helps to give the font the little bit of chaos that makes for verisimilitude.
Jack immediately asked if I would load it onto his computer. I wonder why.
PS: About 50% of Everyday Matters, captions, some of the nuttier pages, is handlettered.
Serendipidity do dah
When folks undergo what, for lack of a less gooey term, I’ll call a creative reawakening, they often experience a surge of synchronicity. Opportunities bounce into their laps. Like minded people just show up. Connections are made, sparks fly, light blink on. Life gets spicy.
Some attribute this to a greater power: “God loves those who create”. Maybe so. I have a more down-to-earth hypothesis.
When you allow yourself to be creative, to make things, to smell roses, see colors, hear symphonies, dance fandangos, your antennas rise. You start to scan through new stations, to retune. Instead of trudging in your rut, you look up and see stars and bluebirds.
The world is always full of opportunity, of possibilities, of stimulus, and pots of gold. When you finally start to look around, to see clearly, to live in the Now and dump your baggage, you can’t help but notice. When you notice the world, you notice it notices you. You open up to people who you would normally ignore, and they open up to you, revealing how much they are like you and how much they like you too. You discover new pages of the menu. You hear lyrics to songs you used to fast forward. You read poems carved in monuments. You open your fortune cookies.
Small wonder the world suddenly seems to be flowing your way. It always did but perhaps you were too busy paddling upstream to notice.
The Art of the Cinema
In the movies, artists are generally bastards, nuts or addicts. Here are some of my favorites.
Biopics
The Agony & the Ecstacy: Irving Stone boils down the Sistine Chapel with a liberal amount of artistic license. Good painting scenes. With Charlton Heston (ugh) as Mike B and Rex Harrison as Julius II.
Lust for Life: More Irving Stone. Kirk as Vincent, Tony Quinn as Gauguin, Vincent Minelli at the helm. Beautiful and nutty and the best Vincent biopic.
Bird: Clint Eastwood’s version of Charlie Parker’s life.Good but not as good as:
Round Midnight: Dexter Gordon plays Bird, Lester Young & Bud Powell all rolled into one. It will make you love jazz.
Moulin Rouge: The original: Toulouse-Lautrec and Zsa Zsa Gabor.
Basquiat: Julian Schnabel directs this story of fame, drugs and demise. I liked Basquiat a lot more than the film but it’s still worth a gander.
Ed Wood: Proof that one of the most important things an artist needs is belief in himself.
Tucker: Automaker as artist. A sunny metaphor for Coppola’s battle with the Hollywood establishment
Amadeus: Nothing like the scene where Mozart dictates the Reqiuem to Salieri. I could watch this dozens of times. And I have.
Savage Messiah: I loved this movie in college. Ken Russell’s bio of French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and his mad affair. Tortured, weird and romantic.
Pollack: Ed Harris’s tribute to Action Jackson but with a little too much drunkness and a little too little painting.
My Left Foot: Danny Day Lewis as Christy Brown, paralyzed poet and painter. Have been meaning to see it for 15 years. Will soon.
Shine: Pianist David Helfgott has a mean dad, a breakdown, and a lot of scenery to chew. Decent but overrated.
Hilary and Jackie: The lives of classical musician sisters, one wild, one straight. I enjoyed it but honestly don’t remember it that clearly.
Documentaries
Rivers and Tides: Simply the best movie I’ve ever seen about the creative process. Documents the work of Andy Goldsworthy the British sculptor. Still in some theatres. Avaialable on DVD in 9/04
Le Mystére Picasso: In 1956, Clouzot filmed Picasso painting on transparent canvases, revising the work as he goes, a chicken becomes a nude becomes a landscape, etc. Mind blowing.
Crumb: portrait of the great underground comix artist and illustrated journal keeper, intense and revealing. See it even if you think you don’t like him.
Wild Wheels: a tribute to art cars (covered with mirrors, grass, plastic fruit, etc) and the people who make them.
28th Instance of June 1914, 10:50 a.m. – McDermott & McGough are a pair of artists who live as if it were PreWWI, their clothes, their home, their plumbing, their manner and their photography. Beautiful and strangely compelling.
Fiction
Edward Scissorhands: A fairy tale about the artist as outsider. By one of the most creative directors in modern cinema.
The Royal Tennenbaums: The story of a creative family and the least good of the great films of Wes Anderson.
The Moderns: Alan Rudolph’s story of artists in Paris in the 1920s is wildly surreal and romantic and has a wonderful soundtrack.
An American in Paris: A highly realistic story of artistic struggle. Gene Kelly, Minelli, and my fav: Oscar Levant.
Quartet: 4 stories, one of a pianist who studies for years to get a critic’s approval. Also by Maugham.
The Razor’s Edge: Bill Murray (of all people) was in the good version of this story of a WWI vet discovering himself as an artist and a spiritual being.. It was very inspiring to me when I first saw it two decades ago.
The Commitments: Slightly too raucous story of an Irish soul band but a good appreciation of appreciation.
The Hours: Virginia Woolf and all that.
New York Stories: The first part of the trilogy is by Scorcese with Nick Nolte as a larger than life painter who can only work when obsessed with a woman. Some beautiful moments.
The Horse’s Mouth: I loved this book as a kid — it made painting into the most heroic of acts. Alec Guiness plays Gulley, a screw up of a painter, in search of the perfect wall for his mural.
Got any to add?
Seeing the Site
I was riding my bike down the West Side yesterday afternoon and passed Ground Zero. It’s a big construction site these days and, like a typical New Yorker, I just breezed past.
For some reason, this time I noticed the West Street Building on the south west corner and I stopped. I looked at it and I saw it for the first time. It’s a landmark building, built in 1905 by Cass Gilbert who also designed my all-time downtown favorite, the Woolworth Building.
While all of the modern buildings round the site are either gone, rebuilt or heavily shrouded, the West Street building was openly wounded. Its Parisian mansard roof is completely draped in black steel mesh. Large pieces of its limestone facade are smashed or cracked off. Its terra cotta tiles, installed for fireproofing, helped to protect it from the burning columns that fell off 2 WTC but took a beating. Ornamental busts around the front door were decapitated. Through the empty windows I could see rubble in what once an elegant interior.
This building was so stately and built to endure. Now, it stands with gaping holes. My instinctive reaction was an angry sadness that the people who did this knew nothing about our city, didn’t understand the significance of the history they erased. Not that it would have influenced them. The Taliban well understood the history of the giant Bamiyan Buddhas they dynamited in Afghanistan, when they kicked off the culture wars by destroying some lovely art.But of course who of us understand the history of the buildings our government has destroyed in Afghanistan and Iraq? Not to mention the stories of all those lives erased forever. It’s all so shitty.
While our friends in Washington pass the buck, I realized how I have been dulled to the enormity of what has happened to my city and this world. I follow the news closely and yet I have formed a thick carapace to protect me from the effects of all this horror. Noticing that injured building all of a sudden made me disappointed in myself that I had not seen what was right there in front of me, had missed the lesson and the beauty that was lost. So I stayed for a while by its bedside and studied the extent of the damage.
I know I’m not saying anything that isn’t trite or been said so often before. But the skies were the same aching blue I remember from that September day and it all came flooding back. I need to see better no matter how it stings.
(If you’re enjoying this, and would like to depress yourself even further, check out the tiny movie I made eleven days after 9/11. P.S. The West Street building is under going gradual renovation and will eventually become expensive apartments, overlooking the banks of the World Trade Center.
Hellhounds on my Trail
“Context is everything that isn’t physically contained in the grooves of the record. It includes your knowledge that everyone else says he’s great: that must modify the way you hear him. That he was a handsome and imposing man, a member of a romantic minority, that he played with Charlie Parker, that he spans generations, that he underwent various addictions, that he married Cicely Tyson, that he dressed well, that Jean-Luc Godard liked him, that he wore shades and was very cool, that he himself said little about his work, and so on. Surely all that affects how you hear him: I mean, could it possibly have felt the same if he’d been an overweight heating engineer from Oslo? When you listen to music, aren’t you also ‘listening’ to all the stuff around it, too?”—- Brian Eno
When I was thirteen and we had just come to America, I had never heard of drugs. I may have had some vague sense of them from the adult novels I read but they were very abstract. In Pakistan, in Israel, they just hadn’t been in my sphere of reference. I imagine my mother and stepfather smoked dope, it was the ’60s after all, but not around me.
A few months after I started in eighth grade, they showed us a black and white anti-drug film during morning assembly. The film began with the protagonist, a young Puerto Rican kid smoking some pot with his buddies on an abandoned car. Late he was introduced to coke, and finally to horse, smack, H, and became a junkie. He ODed twice, the final time in the shower.
That night I woke my mother and step father up at two a.m.
“I can’t sleep, I told them. Waking up my insomniac mother was about the most dangerous and forbidden thing I could do, but I was desperate.
“What is it?”
“I think I’m a junkie.”
“What?!” they both leaped at me, frothing.
My stepfather grabbed me. “Where did you get the stuff?”
“I don’t know!”
“Don’t lie to me, boy. Who’s your dealer?”
“I swear,” I started to cry.” I think I’m such a junkie, I don’t know it.”
I told them abut the film, and how my imagination had me convinced that I could be leading a split double life, one in which I was a nerdy hundred point bookworm with a faint moustache, the other in which I was a stone cold junkie.
“Go back to bed,” my stepfather said. Clearly I was going to get no sympathy.
All of which is a long way of telling you why I was sort of anxious when Russell, our guitar teacher, urged me to buy “Jimi Hendrix: Blues” to listen to with Jack. I have studiously avoided any sort of psychedelic, heavily distorted bluesy rock and roll classic rock for thirty years, ever since the scene in that black and white 16 mm. film in which the young Puerto Rican does coke for the first time. In the background, a portable gramophone is playing some sort of shrieking, wailing guitar track and that sound has been linked in my mind with the spiraling descent into oblivion ever since.
But the fact is, we are learning a lot of blues these days and Hendrix was the god so I had to check it out.
First off, the guy is unbelievably good. Once I had a beer and read the liner notes a few times, I steeled myself and hit play. Hendrix had enormous facility and seemed to know every sound the guitar could possibly make deep in his marrow. He’d been playing since he was five and had probably had the guitar in his hands most of the time since. His playing has incredible variety, eccentricity, and expression. I won’t try to explain here why but suffice it to say, though his playing is so far away from anything I can do, listening to that album was enormously inspiring and just made me want to play, any old way I can. More though, it made me want to draw, strangely enough, I pull out my dip pen and attack the page, drawing mad dogs. The dip pen seemed the most appropriate, the most out of control weapon to use to spray ink around, like a living thing in my hand, the stroke widening with my clutch, then backing off into spirally tendrils, squealing then whispering, throbbing and choking, like Jimi’s guitar.
I haven’t fully overcome my hard rock phobia. It is very deeply wired into me. But I am able to overcome that anxiety well enough to really listen to Hendrix and more importantly to feel it, to surrender to it and to be moved by it. Jimi said: “Blues is easy to play, but hard to feel.” Well, he made me feel it.
I don’t know if I’m ready for Hot Tuna or the Black Sabbath or Megadeath or all those other bands I ran from in my youth.But I did discover that in the end, Jimi is just a more joyous, exuberant, fuzzy and wah-wah version of Miles. And I dig Miles.
Overcoming your preconceptions is damned hard but it’s the only way to grow. I grew a little this morning. In fact, my pants are hard to button.
Danny Gregory 
Comments
How about Life with Picasso by Francoise Gilot?
Posted by: Lisa Ridolfi | May 3, 2004 05:15 PM
According to IMDB there’s a TV film called:
Pablo Picasso: Réminiscence
Is that the one?
What’s it like?
Posted by: Danny | May 3, 2004 05:19 PM
I love your top two documentaries. I just watched Love is the Devil about Francis Bacon, which I found very fascinating.
Posted by: debbie ann | May 3, 2004 05:28 PM
Then there’s “Surviving Picasso”, came out a few years ago.
Posted by: Clarity | May 3, 2004 05:42 PM
Benny and Joon has some wonderful scenes with Mary Stuart Masterson’s character creating directly on the canvas using her hands as well as drawing with more traditional materials.
Posted by: Andi | May 3, 2004 06:01 PM
‘Camille Claudel’ is a wonderful movie about the life of the sculptor that worked for Rodin and then later became his mistress. Of course its a tragic story , women artists didn’t really have a chance in those days . She ends up being committed by her brother the french poet Paul Claudel . I don’t think she was crazy just filled with a lot of passion for her art . Passion was not something women were allowed to feel in those days.
Posted by: erin | May 3, 2004 06:05 PM
what about Cavaragio by Derek jarman and there was a great documetary about that mail artist based in NY which I saw at the edinburgh film festival… but I can’t remember his name!
Posted by: m | May 3, 2004 06:39 PM
I recently saw Frida with Salma Hayek. Apart from the fact that she is much more gorgeous than the real Frida to look at, I thought the quirkiness of this movie was brilliant. It surprised me.
Posted by: Lise | May 3, 2004 06:46 PM
A friend of mine at work keeps INSISTING that I need to see “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” because of its art theme. Maybe that would be a good one to check into! Thanks for the listings!
Posted by: Linda M. | May 3, 2004 07:23 PM
As a documentary on the creative process and the techniques and aids used by the some of the great masters I highly recommend David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge – it is available in both video and book. I was absolutely fascinated when the documentary screened here in Australia, it opened many new insights and evolution of the creative process.
Posted by: Detlef | May 3, 2004 08:12 PM
i agree with the royal tenenbaums also because wes anderson’s brother did all the great illustrations (the ones that “Richie Tenenbaum” does) and all the “book” illustrations and also does a great job on the rushmore/royal tenenbaums special additions packages.
also : American Splendor about Harvey Pekar (!!!) with a little bit of Crumb (!)
Posted by: jeanette | May 3, 2004 08:24 PM
I must also cast a vote for Frida. What a beautiful movie! Each frame is an artistic composition with rich rich color. Also, I’m afraid Bill Murray’s Razor’s Edge, although I’m sure his intentions were good, cannot hold a candle to the book which was simply amazing. The problem with the movie is that the protagonist is just not supposed to be a funny guy! Another movie not to be missed is My Architect which is about Louis Kahn. It’s still playing at some theaters but I’m buying this one when it’s available. This from someone who doesn’t watch the same movie twice.
Posted by: Glo | May 3, 2004 08:53 PM
P.S. –
what about songs about art / artists ?
Posted by: jeanette | May 3, 2004 08:56 PM
how about “artemisia” about artemisia genteleschi (sp?)? struggle of women artists. love affair. torture by thumbscrews. pretty decent film.
Posted by: mary | May 3, 2004 09:15 PM
I loved a documentary on the building of the National Gallery of Art with IM Pei…showing a lot of the work with Henry Moore and Sandy Calder.
All of the work that went into every inch of the place….interesting.
Posted by: Carole Joy | May 3, 2004 09:56 PM
Movies: Sweet and Lowdown, Woody Allen, starring Sean Penn as brilliant guitarist best moment: when penn bashes his guitar against a tree crying “i made a mistake, i made a mistake”
Lady Sings the Blues, Diana Ross Billie Holiday. for the music alone and Ross ain’t too bad either ….
Shadowlands, Debra Winger and Anthony Hopkins, about C.S Lewis
Fiction: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , James Joyce…those last paragraphs/lines, i weep everytime
Sula, Toni Morrison, the artist without an artform
Oranges are Not The Only Fruit, Jeannette Winterton, evangelical upbringing + lesbian= writer
Einstein’s Dreams Alan Lightman, a mathematic/scientific poet….vignette dream meditations on Einsteins mind during his patent clerk days toiling on relativity by night.
Posted by: andrea | May 3, 2004 11:30 PM
whoops! guess i added books too….woolf/the hours made me do it!
sorry
Posted by: andrea | May 3, 2004 11:43 PM
How to Draw a Bunny – about Ray Johnson, mail artist (2002)
Goya: The movie (1999)
(Also liked Frida and Girl with a Pearl Earring)
“Angels and Insects” includes scenes of a woman who keeps an artistic nature journal … although there are definitely other themes …
I’ll keep thinking …
Posted by: Karen Winters | May 4, 2004 01:17 AM
My Architect – about Louis Kahn, got an Oscar nod this year, and well deserved too.
Rivers and Tides? I dunno. I felt like even more of an outsider to Goldsworthy’s work after seeing that. It would have benefitted from some serious editing.
That’s my $.02
Posted by: ben. | May 4, 2004 03:21 PM
It’s not totally about an artist’s struggle, but A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, film by James Ivory, based on a novel-based-on-her-life by Kaylie Jones (her dad was James Jones, who wrote From Here to Enternity), is about growing up in a bohemian, artistic family.
Also, Un Coeur En Hiver, a French film about a violinist and the man who makes her the violin.
Posted by: Jen | May 4, 2004 03:49 PM
Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould is a wonderful movie. About Glenn Gould.
Posted by: D. | May 4, 2004 04:33 PM
I’d nominate Pecker by John Waters – quirky, funny and very, very scathingly revealing about the machinations of the art world.
Posted by: Kirsty Hall | May 4, 2004 05:05 PM
Not to be missed is the PBS special on photographer Ansel Adams; I think it was from the series “the American Experience.” Available from the PBS catalog.
Posted by: Kathleen Piercefield | May 4, 2004 05:38 PM
“Agony and the Ecstacy” also has a wonderful score by Alex North. I often listen to it while I’m working.
Posted by: MG | May 4, 2004 09:41 PM
Tony Hancock’s comdey ‘The Rebel’ c.1960; an office worker goes off to live the artist’s life in Paris. Although Hancock was the best-loved sitcom star in Britain at the time he had a yearning to do a movie like Jacques Tati’s. Never quite pulled it off, tragically.
Posted by: Richard | May 5, 2004 12:15 PM
How To Draw a Bunny about Ray Johnson is really worth going out of your way to see.
Posted by: debbie ann | May 5, 2004 12:21 PM
La Belle Noiseuse by Jacques Rivette
Dream of Light by Victor Erice
Posted by: Chris | May 5, 2004 12:50 PM
A couple of months ago I saw back-to-back three films about artists:
Pandaemonium about poet Samuel Coleridge and his friendship with Woodsworth – and descent into drug-addled craziness – a rocknroll account of an interesting fellow.
Passion about composer Percy Grainger, another troubled artist, the story took me by surprise having thought him a “simple” sort of composer. I was very mistaken.
and The Pianist, the haunting Polanski film about Szpilman’s endurance through Nazi terror in Warsaw.
They were all exhausting and heart-wrenching stories. But man oh man, it was a good day.
Posted by: andrea | May 5, 2004 01:32 PM
The Fifth Element!
see – the part where bruce willis is listening to the diva sing – and it keeps cutting back to Leelo fighting the badguys over the stones.
see – there’s this pretty little moment when he believes everything is true. Art shows the way to love shows the way to love saves the universe.
i really need to write about this more coherently someday. 😀
Posted by: charity | May 5, 2004 01:39 PM
I have to second Stone’s Lust for Life…the movie made me want to find out more about Vincent…I saw it after hearing the song by Don MaClean–Starry Starry Night. (GREAT POET/GREAT SONG…ONE OF MY FAVORITES!!) By the way…I learned how to play it on my tin whistle Danny…how’s the guitar going????
I also have to second The Pianist. The compelling love and urge to play music touched my soul. His identity was more deeply embeded as a pianist, rather than a Jew. I feel my art defines me more than anything else as well.
Thanks everyone…I will have to visit the video store on some of these!!
Posted by: Nancy Patterson | May 5, 2004 01:57 PM
I haven’t seen this one added, it is fairly obscure. You seem to
be an enthusiastic Van Gogh fan like myself, and you would
definitely enjoy “Vincent and Theo”. It shows a lot of the darker
side of Van G.’s life, such as the time he took in a pregnant
prostitute. The scenes are brilliant and suffused with the yellow
light of “The Night Cafe”.
Directed by Robert Altman, it stars Tim Roth as a quiet, intense,
muttering painter. I love this film and watch it every few months.
Also someone mentioned “Surviving Picasso” and “Camille Claudel”. Camille is devastatingly sad, but casts a lot of light on the relationship between herself and Rodin.
I also would like to mention a great film that stars J. M. Basquiat as himself, “Downtown 81”. It is a musical and poetic romp through the art and post-punk scene of NYC circa 1981. It was recently released after 20 years on a shelf! Great fun film, also with amazing live music scenes and a cameo by Blondie.
Posted by: shelly | May 5, 2004 02:04 PM
A good movie about becoming an artist, against all odds:
“Dog of Flanders”
(the original 1959 version, with David Ladd, Donald Crisp, Monique Ahrens, Theodore Bikel,)
Posted by: Anna L. Conti | May 5, 2004 06:31 PM
The documentary Speaking in Strings about violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg profiles a very passionate and unorthodox musician.
Posted by: Kim | May 6, 2004 12:05 PM
i don’t have a film to add, though i did enjoy Pollack, but thank you Dan once again, for your unfettering vision. that’s what attracted me to your site initially, you take a stand for all those individuals who allowed themselves to be consumed, perhaps devoured by their passion for visual expression. you are truly a becon on this artists’ path.
Posted by: doug | May 6, 2004 05:57 PM
‘Life and Death of Vincent Van Gogh’: the biography of Vincent using only his paintings, some locations and excerpts from his correspondence.It was powerful movie.
-Nandita
Posted by: Nandita | May 7, 2004 12:50 AM
For fictional: “The Legend of 1600.” Beautiful. The duel between the protagonist and Jelly Roll Morton is one of the most amazing scenes on film. Great score by Ennio Morricone (his last, in fact).
Posted by: TPB, Esq. | May 8, 2004 03:11 PM
henry and june!
Posted by: jean zaque | May 17, 2004 04:27 PM
Just in case anybody else is still checking out the comments on this post, here’s a hard-to-find but really great doc of an artist: Gabriel Orozco (that’s the name of the film and the artist). To crib from the Miami film fest: “Internationally recognized Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco uses found objects to instigate a dialogue into how meaning can be formed from the arbitrary and the ordinary.” Very inspiring.
Posted by: ajane | June 14, 2004 11:14 PM
i too was so totally mesmerized by Le Mystére Picasso, i think its a really long film, but both times ive seen it i cannot rememeber time. I can only remember at the end kind of waking up and realizing my mouth was open and i had a crusty line of drool leading from the side of my mouth.
How about an angel at my table – both film and book
Posted by: pantiesontherod | June 19, 2004 02:50 AM
i too was so totally mesmerized by Le Mystére Picasso, i think its a really long film, but both times ive seen it i cannot rememeber time. I can only remember at the end kind of waking up and realizing my mouth was open and i had a crusty line of drool leading from the side of my mouth.
How about an angel at my table – both film and book
Posted by: pantiesontherod | June 19, 2004 02:53 AM