‘The sower broadcasting his seed was an image that had been with him almost since he had become an artist. It stood for a painter - or an evangelist - sowing the seed of beauty and truth.’
Martin Gayford, The Yellow House: Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles

My mother’s standard answer when complimented on her cooking was, ‘I just use good recipes.’ As though, with the right recipe, tasty food just makes itself.

My nephew drives his invention, pictured here, around southern California, for no apparent reason.  Were he selling busses, boats or amusement, he’d have the perfect schtick.  Crazy contradiction gets our attention.

His cousin, new college grad, went from cap and gown to shirt and shoes in a day, writing code for a midwest start-up.  He loves his job but sometimes wishes he’d majored in design, a place he gets lost in.

History is art, because story is art. Able writers interest us in world events by framing them in story.  And by the way, you and I are world events.

The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War tells the story of Warren G. Harding’s 15 year affair with Caroline F. Phillips.  Of their fiery correspondence, many of his letters remain. The book is a fascinating juxtaposition of personal revelations and global political fault lines. In the heightened patriotism of World War I, Phillips’ German sympathies threatened her personal safety and Harding's political solvency. When she was suspected by the nascent FBI of spying for the enemy, Senator and future President Harding sent her this cautionary plea:

‘You have the intellect, the soul and personality, please command the poises befitting your superiority.’
Warren G. Harding

Sometimes lives of the past can dwarf our ordinary lives, but it’s worth remembering that we know these people through story. Boringness has been edited out. Even primary sources, letters in Harding’s own hand, were sculpted by the author. Ordinary and extraordinary lives, framed and pondered, reverberate through story craft.

This week, Young Audiences of Northeast Ohio asked me to represent myself and 60 artist colleagues for a television interview. Grappling with how best to explain my storytelling work in schools, I wanted to ‘command the poises’ - an artist mantra so aptly penned by Harding. A kind friend sent me these words just before the interview:

‘You are smart, sharp and a role model. You'll be terrific.’

Thus bolstered, I stepped before the cameras. I had a hunch my audience would glaze its eyes at concepts like ‘arts/curriculum integration,’ so I looked my interviewer in the eye and reenacted an Ohio & Erie Canal digger of Harding’s era. I became humble Italian-American Tony, one of my fourth graders’ favorite immigrant entrepreneurs, plying his enthusiasms with twinkling grace. What better way for students to frame, absorb and remember the past?

When story happens, large or small, nerves give way to art, preparation matures into performance, boringness vanishes and the rest, they say, is history.

Critics have dismissed Paul Gauguin as an artist who could not draw well, and knew it, who therefore turned to a more primitive style of expression.  Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin was the never published companion catalogue to Gauguin’s French exhibition of 60 paintings and block prints completed in Tahiti.  The public of Gauguin’s day judged his work harshly, the same work that later left Pablo Picasso in Gauguin’s thrall and fetches millions in today’s market.

These strains of a master’s tortured past were the stuff of two mini-lectures last night in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Ingalls Library.  As I listened, I remembered Stephen Colbert pointedly asking Tom Campbell of the Metropolitan Museum of Art what makes art “art.”  Who decides what’s worthy?  Campbell explained that trained experts determine the authenticity and significance of older works, but he had no words for what makes art good, or bad.

Last night, surrounded by a tacto-visual repast the librarians had laid out for us - clippings, postcards, prints and the like - we heard muffled cheers erupting from adjoining offices.  Who knew, the CMA staff watches Wednesday night football?

Our hosts explained later that the museum had just learned of a much hoped for acquisition for its collection. “What is it?” we asked. “Can’t tell you,” they answered, beamingly mysterious.  We’d have to wait, like everyone else, for the morning paper.

My mother would have loved this story.  Then again, she most likely listened in, her beneficent ghost haunting us calmly in that still space.  Jane Sylvia Hewes Weber was painter, librarian and mother.  She plied shelves at home with art books and dragged her kids and grandkids to museums, including this very Cleveland museum.  Thanks to the librarians and Gauguin’s fragrant works, I now know where to find my mother when I miss her too much to ponder.  She is there, on the walls, in the spaces of art she found worthy even as she found her own efforts wanting.  Undaunted as the wild Gauguin, she painted on canvas and upon her progeny’s lives with a certain brave innocence.  She let us be seers and seekers; she bade us be air.

Her ghost, with a nod to Monsieur Gauguin, inspired these lyrics once:

Watercolor on my shoulder.  Watercolor in my hair.
Watercolor on the border, water in the air.
Promise me to be the water.  Promise me to be the air.
Susan Weber, Air

I used to think imagination preceded art. If dreams run rampant, haunting the day with their memories, that’s inspiration, right? If feelings are ripe, it’s time to create something. Yes? 

Then there was that time I stepped out of my comfort zone into an acting class taught by Scott Plate. Asking his students to journal about their experiences, he promised to read every word. I soon began to richly dream, and freely add the findings to my journal. 

The dreams were vivid and complex, my sense and sensitivity at full tilt. A gift, I thought, that just when assigned the task of introspection, dreams should surface, ripe with illustration.  

Bill Moyers recently aired an interview from 2004. He asked Maurice Sendak, author illustrator of ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ how he calmed his own demons.

'Art has always been my salvation. And my gods are Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mozart. I believe in them with all my heart. And when Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can't explain. I don't need to. I know that if there's a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart. Or if I walk in the woods and I see an animal, the purpose of my life was to see that animal. I can recollect it, I can notice it. I'm here to take note of. And that is beyond my ego, beyond anything that belongs to me.'
Maurice Sendak, Bill Moyers Journal

Elsewhere I’ve tracked the rational act of making this video.  Here you’ll find the visceral exposé. 

I’ve been Paul Fresty’s friend since our paths crossed in a songwriter circle many moons back.  Suddenly last summer, my imperious muse bade me go see Paul’s Beatles cover band (Revolution Pie) perform for a crowd of groovers and shakers.  Beatlemania was palpable as the stars, settling over the lovers of magic like a sweet dream.  My hand knew not whither to aim the lens in the midst of this wide angle lovefest.

What you see here, to the sound of one fine band and its devotees, is how one of those Beatles tunes moved me.  To film it.  To seek out images worthy of its joy.  To combine, revise, revisit, refine - and finally send it all up to the webiverse for you and your fond friends. 

Anyone who’s edited video knows you floss your ears many times with the audio tracks in play.  Thanks to Revolution Pie, mine was a happy duty.  As for the visuals, well, what better excuse than classic McCartney-Lennon to delve for the best in humanity?

Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well has been ‘treated like the ugly stepchild of the Bard’s canon,’ according to dramaturg Jeffrey Ullom, who says the term ‘problem play‘ is often employed ‘when directors and dramaturges find a play too complicated or challenging for their own individual talents.’


Modern life is often a problem play of sorts.  Evidence of this includes the information glutosphere, the complicated health care debate or the nebulous personal career path.  You might expect Shakespeare’s problem plays to be runaway smash hits, channeling the zeitgeist head on.

The problem with problems, though, is that they’re so very problematic.  Problems beget problems.  Complexity can overwhelm. 

A good play, or comparable art production, may indeed be a way to purge the art goer’s inner doubts about his/her preparedness to slay the beast.  Or, citizenry of the denial class may just as soon float off into lesser dramas, where heros and heroines try to convince us decisions are cool and easy for the pure of heart.

I’m not pure of heart.  Are you?  Kudos to you who truthfully say you are.  The rest of us turn to art, making it or seeking it, just to hold our heads above the fray of problem plays, ubiquitous and draining.

Friend of this site mccn sent me a photo of Ernest Hemmingway kicking a can, part of a thriving Artist in Action photo series.  A companion photo to your left comes from a Wikimania 08 conference, a type of gathering that involves a lot of not shutting up.  As for making something, there is always a good possibility of being inspired by a bunch of sojourners to go home and dig in with the muse.

Ironically, if I spend much of this morning organizing my thoughts around the issue the two photos raise, I’ll be kicking my can of worms, video editing and production, down the Saturday avenue of procrastination (in good company, apparently). 

So I leave you with a thought fragment, along with everything the photos conjure in your inner-sphere --

When we become artist-politicians, looking outward to the next vote from onlookers (or our own critical mass), we’re more likely to punt and shrug our way to the periphery of the making core. 

Wiser guys than I know this well.

I understand that the politically safe move would be to kick the can further down the road - to defer reform one more year, or one more election, or one more term.
Barack Obama, September 9, 2009 address to Congress

Artist in Action.  Oxymoron or precription? 

Most of the available footage for Wide Open is from a stationary camera.  When I zoom in to vary the perspective, I like the graininess of the close ups.  So I decide to go for the black and white, jittery look of old footage.  Think CBGBs in the 70's.