Art and Control

This pic on the right here, probably that's the most people I've ever drawn. Probably close to 5000 people represented there in a little sketch.

Maybe it's the most people drawn per square inch, you never know.

Should contact the Guiness Book of World Records and let them know that probably that's the most people per square inch (PSI).

In other Art News

My friend Chris and I saw a modern dance performance the other night called The Invisibles and it was really good! It seemed to me that the choreographer (Jessica Jobaris) did an amazing job of keeping the thing intact, 90 minutes of dancing and runnning and falling and acting and all SORTS of things were going on and it still held up.

We didn’t really read up on it beforehand and so it wasn’t until afterwards that I realized (or remembered) that the characters were linked to real people. I don’t think that detracted from my enjoyment and in fact I think it sorta made it better for me, not to have the characters historical.

And to have it all work out like it did anyway is a real testimony to the fact that the dance connected to the audience big time, I really felt that everybody thoroughly enjoyed themselves.

My feeling is that the connection with the audience was on a deeper, subconscious level like an an archetypal level or somepin, causing certain reactions in people that sometimes weren’t understandable consciously. Jessica Jobaris mentioned in an article that people were laughing at parts that she thought were sad and I noticed things like that myself throughout the performance, and both Chris and I remarked after the show that we thought we were understanding a lot of it on a deeper level than our conscious mind, that certain things weren’t explainable if we had to talk about them, but that we understood them somehow.

It sort of seemed that at some point that the whole thing took on a life of it's own , something that the choreographer didn’t plan on necessarily but which was a good good thing.

I think if you’re an artist and this happens you gotta let it go and not get too worried about it, even though it sometimes can be tuff. A correlation in a way is when somebody paints a painting and people see all sorts of things in it that the artist didn’t intend. It’s easy to be miffed at that, to try to control the piece of art and their reaction, but it’s a smart artist (and a good one) who can overcome that feeling of wrongness and let the piece of art just be.

I've heard the comment many times from authors that their characters seemed to take over while they were writing a book, that they did things in the story that the author never intended them to do.

In the face of a piece of art taking on a life of it's own, if you can just let it go, let it be what it wants to be, I think that it means that you are operating correctly as an artist. You’re a conduit between the world and your audience, you open the pipes and whoosh it all comes flowing out, full of life. And not everybody can do that I think, but Jessica Jobaris surely did.

Anyway, it was great, and she definitely should keep on doing what she's doing.