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Successful Artists
Greetings from Berkeley, California.
Here’s what I’m doing on my summer vacation.
I’m cocooning in a small sublet on Rose Street, a few blocks from the gourmet ghetto, taking a break from the blazing Texas summer.
This is an annual pilgrimage for me and my husband, Ross. The basic ground rule is that we don’t leave the neighborhood — except to drive to the marina for our evening constitutional, or to daytrip in Napa.
There’s no real reason to leave the neighborhood. Everything we need is within walking distance: yoga studio, pizza collective, Black Oak Books, artists’ coop, Rose Garden, swimming pool, and Virginia Bakery.
Even within this circumscribed world, I’m surrounded by successful artists of every sort.
First, there’s Margaret, our upstairs neighbor, a retiree. She took off for a week in Mendocino to take a workshop in oil painting, a medium she’s never tried before. (Her teachers were allergic to turpentine, so they stuck to acrylics.)
Then there’s James Morgan, author of Chasing Matisse, one of my first reads here. Morgan left his beloved home and (relatively) stable career as a writer to fulfill a dream, to recreate the path of Matisse’s life through France. Not only do I envy Morgan’s happy recklessness, I admire his resourcefulness. To help fund his journey, he and his wife bartered hotel services for a spot on their website.
There’s Mary Law, whose sandwich board signs led Ross and me through the industrial neighborhood down by the freeway, as a detour from our drive to the marina. On Saturdays Mary sets out the signs and opens up her pottery studio/gallery. The studio, massively windowed and solar-powered, is set at the back of her property, beyond her brown-shingled house and her garden. An old dog, wearing a cowboy bandana, sniffs us perfunctorily. Molly-the-black-cat insists on extended conversation. We linger in this idyll on the way out, enjoying the persimmon tree (Mary uses its leaves to press into some of her plates) and the golden yellow finches that are lingering here, too.
From Mary’s studio we follow another set of street corner signs, this one leading us to a glass studio. The small gallery is in front, with at least five ovens of varying sizes and purposes in the back. My first thought: it’s so neat, so clean. Turns out, the place is nearly new, the ovens custom built by the owners. David Hering and his partner used to be the ones having to rent studio time to make their work, and now they’re the studio owners renting time to others. Ross congratulates David on his move “up the food chain.”
Then there’s John Killacky. He’s a filmmaker and former dancer, now the arts and culture program officer at the San Francisco Foundation. (He is well worth the trip to the big city.) A longtime arts administrator, curator, and funder, John gave a terrific presentation at the Americans for the Arts conference, so I wanted to follow up with him in person. We talked about lots of worrying trends and promising strategies in the arts. One idea of John’s that I’ll pass along here is the shift he envisions our audiences could make from “retail” mode to philanthropic mode. We’ve trained our audiences to pay for tickets, he explains, rather than to support the larger enterprise. Why not do “the ask” church-style, in the theatre, passing the plate when the believers are in throes of art? John is convinced, and John is a smart guy, that people will be happy to pay more than the ticket price, given the opportunity.
Finally, there’s Stanley Kunitz. I discovered his book, The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, sitting out on a new titles table at Black Oak Books. (Among my other splurges that day: “Rivers and Tides,” the documentary on Andy Goldsworthy that I saw in part at the Austin Museum of Art a few months ago. I aspire to the condition of Goldsworthy, to be in awe of the very fact that I am alive.) Kunitz’s book is so incredibly beautiful, I’m reading it slowly, making it last as long as possible. I’ll close with a quote:
“A poet needs both the awareness of the self and the desire to know others, to share one’s self of being with others. The poet in the very act of writing the poems is reaching out to others. This search is to find a vessel — to create a vessel first — that will reach others. Art must have a social sense, a sense of the society in which we live and thrash.”
All best,
Ann
June 2005