Woke up this morning at the ranch of artist friend and colleague Nina Karavasiles. The ranch, situated in the high chaparral area of San Diego County, is an integrated system of buildings, gardens, outdoor rooms, and alternative energy production being created daily by the artist and her long-time partner, Scott Richards. I am there to meet with other public artists, members of a group started four years ago, called Public Address. Our art works are part of the San Diego urban fabric, and are also found in other American cities and wild spaces. We come together monthly as a kind of fellowship, but with a focus on arts advocacy, technical support, resource sharing, professional development, and community and binational outreach. Oh yes, and we enjoy each other's company, having come together to break through the usual competitive barriers that keep artists from creating communities of support and common cause.
Several years ago I found myself seated next to a national labor organizer flying home after helping San Diego Symphony musicians negotiate their contract with management. He spoke plainly about the situation of visual artists and their inability to receive appropriate wages, benefits and protections as professionals. We were, in his words, doomed by our failure to organize and bargain collectively. We were at the mercy of whatever commissioning agencies, public or private, might hire us. I agreed entirely, and like other San Diego artists I was beginning to think seriously about how we might join together as a force for changing the conditions under which artists labor.
Today, more than four years after the first group of artists met at a coffee shop, we are about 20 committed members creating links to disciplines in the sciences, the environment, education, and housing. We have managed to accomplish the writing of our own public art master plan ("Public Art is a Verb"), an artists' contract, public art tour, professional development seminars, curriculum year, resource listings, and a hell of a winter holiday party.
These people have kept me coming back to myself as an artist during a time when the artist collaborative team I had formed with my former partner came apart in a long and corrosive dissolution. Some days I had trouble remembering that I was an artist and that my ideas, my vision, and my abilities had helped communities transform themselves. When the practice of creativity seemed to be slipping out of my grasp, these artists were the rope that kept me tethered to a secure landfall.
Today I am actively engaged in rebuilding my singular creative life. I find that the well of imagination is deeper than I believed, and that my hand produces a line which I no longer struggle at recognizing. I am surprised at how easy it has become—that the ideas are spilling out onto the pages of my sketchbook with a quiet, confident force. The possibilites for learning, especially in areas of programming and technology, make the world seem wide and full of choices.
Here I remember what choreographer Twyla Tharp said about a life grounded in art making. "Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity." This ranch, which underscores the dancer's observation, is filled with Nina and Scott's elegant little touches. The cabin where I am staying,once a tar paper shack with an old trailer bonded to its exterior walls, is a solar lit retreat kept snug by a roaring wood stove. Its windows frame the view of the rocks and valley below and a small deck floats over an outdoor gathering space. An outside table has a collection of bits and pieces of black, industrial feldspar that covers the land. I pick up two for the little altar that hangs in my studio above my computer. Further up the hill the couple have taken an industrial farm building and transformed it into an elegant work and living space. Every corner reveals a surprise, every detail demonstrates a sense of caring about good design and mindful living.
As I wander across the property I notice the native granite stones arranged as "staircases" with little pebbles cached in between the "risers" like funny stone dentures. A wooden cherub stands guard over the bathroom/shower building, the big brother of all the little found sculpture pieces catching you unawares on your walk. There are old tools everywhere, rusting and softening with the elements. Metal, wood, stone, glass, concrete and cloth have come together in this place of balance and repose. And there is a great sense of humor that overlays everything. Nina is, after all, the Director of Mayhem, and no-nonsence Scott has a wicked sense of humor and a potent delivery. They are good, even great, people.
This place has comforted me in its manifestation of mindfulness—the deliberate choices and gestures made toward the beautiful and the humane.
I'll be one my way down the mountain to my meeting in the city by late morning. There I will present my public art concepts for a housing project for working families. It will go well.
Today is my birthday. I am 52 years old.
