The cat in the painting on the wall is based on a real model, thus is real, it is artist Bob Pinner’s neighbors’ cat, comes visiting twice a day, enough time to give Pinner to sketch it out, pin it down in colors, even talk to her. Pinner believes that “whatever you love is going to come out in the art you make.” Pinner said that if you listen in an active way, you will hear your art talking back at you and unraveling itself where to take you next.
The cat in the painting on the wall is based on a real model, thus is real, it is artist Bob Pinner’s neighbors’ cat, comes visiting twice a day, enough time to give Pinner to sketch it out, pin it down in colors, even talk to her. Pinner believes that “whatever you love is going to come out in the art you make.” Pinner said that if you listen in an active way, you will hear your art talking back at you and unraveling itself where to take you next.
So, now we are all looking at Pinner’s cat hanging on the wall at the Lakeside Library one late evening last week when the Harvest Moon gave a whiplash to the photographers crowded around Lindo Lake while in the inside a bunch of artsy people are talking, singing, reciting poetry about the creative act. Our host is East County artist Mona Mills, the founder of the Creativity Project that gathers together artists of all kind who want to learn about and integrate into their work exotic sounding concepts, such as “ritual, lack of preconception, conversions and flash images, ease and grace, work as partner and driver, looking back and focus.” Ok, “focus” sounds more Earth-like, that one was easy. Mills continuing Creativity Project offers a forum for artists of all types and experience to share methods of creativity, using 10 methods that all artists use in the art of creativity. The 10 points of discussion of individual artists included which of these steps were used to drive the force of creativity in specific areas of art. The 10 Methods of Creating included: Focus, Ritual, Lack of Preconception, Conversions and flash images/sensations, Work as a partner and driver, Ease and grace, Flexibility, Emotion, Time, coming back, looking back and Use of symbolism and synchronicity.
Mills is well known throughout San Diego County and has partnered with the San Diego County Library on many projects including the Legends Project that honors living heroes in our communities. She has also been commissioned by the County Library for several murals throughout the county located within different branches of the County Library system. Her work can also be seen at the Heritage of Americas Museum, Chicano Park and other venues in San Diego County and beyond.
I am lost. I only see paintings all over the walls, photos and comics on top of furniture, two guitars waiting graciously in a corner of this improvised stage, a cement hand (of God, how we are being told later) resting inside a fiberglass box, the library small space trying to take deep breaths when overwhelmed with the intensity of the moment when somebody, an artist for sure, fires up the atmosphere with thoughts, memories, feelings and, of course, stares.
A stare is every artist’ signature mark in this world. When you see them fixing an unidentified dot in the universe, you know something major is taking place, the world is creating and recreating itself under the artists’ magic spell.
One such moment is when journalist and photographer Albert Fulcher talked about his most favorite story, the mysterious saga of Arinda, a fascinating jazz musician and artist who broke up with her boyfriend one day and evaded all the way to Mexico to wash out hear heart while teaching little kids art. She was discovered by the Huichol Indians of the Sierra Madre Occidental tribe leaders and offered to teach the native children. She accepted. Until one day, when the tribe chief asked her, “What do you think of the women of this tribe, Arinda?” And she said, “ I will never be like them, sharing one man with others.” I imagine how the tribe leader gasped for air when proposing, “Arinda, then you will be a warrior and you’ll train with our best.” And so Arinda went and learned the art of war from the men of the tribe. Today, Arinda is a warrior of the Huichol tribe and an advocate of preserving the long history of their existence. While Fulcher still lives in the USA, more precisely around here in San Diego, still writing stories about people in a way that invites to raw and pure connections unadulterated by preconceptions, because as Fulcher confesses, he does not like to prepare for an interview.
Still tip toeing about the idea of relationship, artist-art, artist-world, and now artist and her “Pennsylvania Valley,” painter Aniko Makranczy uses colors to express such relationships. When asked if she paints from photos, Makranczy says one could tell when a painting is based on a photo and when on a sketch and that she prefers to sketch. Her art is fabulous and vibrant, her trees could end up purple and her lakes pink and the grass red and nobody in the audience seems to mind, on the opposite, people do not care about reality anymore, everybody looks a little dreamy holding those wine glasses in their hands and looking at art with rosy cheeks.
So, now you have a theatre with no chairs, because who cares how the world is seen from the outside. If you are a ballerina on the stage, you don’t see chairs. You see the conductor, people’s eyes staring at you, the curtains, feel the rough stage under your fractured toes, just like in the “Maestro’s Magic,” by Barbara Krystoff-Scott. Shhh, the orchestra is getting ready to start!
There were many emotional and inspiring moments, when Linda Mullen told how she finally felt like a real artist when she bought her first tube of professional paint, paying $28 and some change for it. Came home, could not hold the brush in her shaking hands, rushed to the kitchen, chopped down some dish sponges with a knife, used the crumbles to dip them in the water, then in the paint and voila, this is how legends are born, out of passion and determination. Mullen’s second painting won an award.
Eh, but look at the other ballerina, in pink, she looks like floating over the tender grayness of the abstract stage, with half laughing, half crying masks behind her and look at her feet…wait, what just happened? Mrs. Debra Webb, the storyteller, is here to explain the mystery. “You know when you are a woman,” she asked, and all the women in the audience sigh, knowingly, “well, you know when after so many heartbreaks and hardship and life lessons you think you finally got it?” Do we ever get it? “So you go on the stage, ready, but then you realize you forgot your shoes!” No, not the shoes, everything but the shoes, Mrs. Webb. Her painting is beautiful, but her trembling hands are even more beautiful. She is using a special device to hold her hand while painting and she pushes hard on it to keep it steady, but it takes months for her to accomplish straight lines. The idea of the shoes that never made it into her painting took four months.
A.J. Fulcher is mesmerizing everybody with his comic book art, pages and pages of stories and thrilling adventures, the last one being about a boy in love with a girl who dies of a horrible death. He goes back in time to save her and …actually, you need to purchase the book, coming out before the end of the year. A.J. started drawing since he could remember and he said he would never stop. He got kicked out of high school when caught drawing, so his promise sounds legit.
Somebody is finally touching one of those pretty guitars. It is Gail Bones, songwriter and singer, also a hiker who once saw a beautiful flower up the mountain that inspired her to write a song about the beauty of creation that has no witnesses (and we all think, then what’s the use for it, right?”) “Did you take a picture of it?” No, I preferred to live in the moment, she answered, reminding us all that the art of connecting with the world and with each other is ever changing, like the chords of her song, beautifully filling the space left behind by her deep voice, turning the now very late event even more dreamier.
Minds start wandering when listening to a 96 years old artist Phoebe Burnham who still paints and every day then to the story of a legally blind woman who is now 92 years old and also determined to keep painting, even if smudges on her canvases are getting a little bigger now days. Thinking of walls and obstacles, how so many gifted artists chose to work with the walls (their limitations) until the walls disappear and about how the more one pushes and fights against the constraints, the more the walls are closing in.
There is one more mystery left uncovered – what did the cat say back to you, Mr. Pinner? “You will never understand me,” is what she said. Well, fair enough.
Open to any artist of any medium or genre, the next Creativity Project is scheduled for March 2017 at the Rancho San Diego Branch Library.
