A painting triggers a memory. A line of poetry evokes a tear. A book, that apparently simple mesh of words, changes your life. Actors whirl across the stage, carrying you down 42nd Street, up to Juliet's balcony of star-crossed love, to the Jellicle Ball where the cats meet once a year. Art moves you. It grabs you by the throat and throttles you, or it gently nudges you along.
To appreciate art is a luxury. But to create art—that, for some, is a necessity. Van Gogh couldn't live without it. "Suffering as I am," he wrote in a letter to his brother, "I cannot do without É the power to create." Of course he then proceeded to separate his left earlobe from the rest of his head, before cutting himself out of this world entirely.
The reason I quote Van Gogh is not so much for the dramatic flair of his story but to illustrate a point: When we think of "art," our minds dash to painting; when we visualize the "artist," we see them before a canvas, dipping their brush into a palette or hurling colors in a Pollock-esque fit of creativity.
In this issue we took artistic license and meandered an atypical path, mostly avoiding the art of painting. For our cover story (p. 33), we worked with Cabrillo Theatre in Thousand Oaks to bring you a unique perspective on the performing arts: a backstage pass, so to speak, to see what goes into a production like CATS.
What drew us to this story wasn't a love of theater per se, but Ventura County's domination of the 2008 Ovation Awards—"L.A.'s most coveted theater honor," according to the Los Angeles Times. T.O.'s Cabrillo topped the Ovation nods, winning more "Tonys" than any other theater in Southern California, and the Ventura-based Rubicon Theatre Company was a close second, taking the most of any dramatic producing company.
I appreciate live theater as an art form, but personally it's not my thing. My thing is words, or as John Steinbeck put it in Cannery Row : "the Word," a capitalized living being, a "symbol and a delight which sucks up men and scenes, trees, plants, factories, and Pekinese."
Of course writing isn't a particularly visual art, so photo ops are limited. And writers themselves tend to be introverted—most don't fit the mold of the characters you usually see in lifestyle magazines. Still, we wanted to include the art of the Word.
In last year's Arts issue we featured a roundtable discussion about a new gallery in Midtown Ventura. This time around (p. 24) we corralled a few different breeds of artists, all of whom utilize words in their work: poetry, painting, and prose. Again we limited the editorial voice, essentially setting the beat and letting the trio riff on the artistic power of those subtle collections of letters.
Though I love writing, you can't beat painting when it comes to accessibility; there it is—ART—right in front of you.
In the early nineties while traveling in China, I found myself in the Beijing gray apartment of a typical working family. A painting hung from a nail in the cinderblock wall, hauntingly rendered in charcoal, at once beautiful and as cold as the leafless winter outside.
I asked the father about it. He told me the painting was the work of his eldest son, who the government had assigned to a permanent position in a coat hanger factory. An artist, trapped in a Chinese coat hanger factory. The art of painting, he said in broken English, was his boy's salvation from the mundanity of his job. It was how he survived.
Yes, Van Gogh suffered alienation in nineteenth century Europe. But when it comes to the way he felt about art, he certainly wasn't alone in this world.
08-01-2009
