Amy C Collins

sitting with the art evangelist

Last week I had the good fortune, in the midst of a particularly prolonged bout with the Negatives and the Doubts, to sit with the Art Evangelist; practical preacher, inspired believer, professional encourager. I’m still reeling.

I first heard about the Art Evangelist, his unwavering belief in the future and importance of art in America, through our mutual friend and fellow artist, Tim Stevenson. What Tim reported had such a positive glow I felt compelled to hear the word for myself. Some weeks later, in mixed company, I stood for the first time in the same room with the Evangelist, and so broached the subject of art. He dove into an electrified speech, spoke excitedly for several minutes. It was too much to process. My slow head needed a proper interview. I retained so little from that first encounter, like a night of enthusiastic drinking, I became too intoxicated by his enthralling excitement to make notes afterward, to recall any details. But I was ready to sign the dotted line, commit my life all over again. 

 

The Man, The Legend

Jerry Foster is, The Art Evangelist. His proper title, a bit more sober, reads: Instructor of Advanced Art Studies at Florence High School. A title hardly touching the magic this man is capable of emitting. 

On entering his art room, Studio One, I met a former student who had brought her thesis work from Mississippi State. She was the first of several former students he expected that day. They come by when they're in town and they check in with him regularly on Facebook. It's easy to see why. Listening to Jerry is like having your own personal fan club. He's rooting for you.

When we talk about art, the few of us who do, we speak of aesthetics and favor - do we like the piece, how does it make us feel, will it go with the living room. Those of us practicing art lean toward discussing form and technique, the process and the payoff. We talk about, to put it simply, fine art. But what about the cars we drive, the chairs we sit in, the tools we use to hang a painting or prepare a meal? Each of these commonplace items, unappreciated and assumed, were designed by a creative mind.

When The Evangelist talks about art he’s talking about the future of America’s workforce, about the next phase of a young and prosperous nation. He’s talking about the creative genius behind the commonplace. Manufacturing is no longer ours. “Made in the USA” has become a point of sale, like “Green” and “All Natural.” Our dependance on imported, affordable goods has spoiled us to no return. That aspect of America’s growth is firmly in the past and our present service industry economy can survive only as long as citizens have money to spend on services, many of them excessive. But art, Foster argues, there’s still art. He believes we have the upper hand on creativity, ingenuity and design. It's our future and if we don't get on top of it while we have the chance, someone else will. Look at an iPod, iPad or Mac computer, next to the serial number, and you'll see the words "Designed by Apple in California." Followed by, "Assembled in China.” Not only do the folks at Apple get it, they’re waving the Go flag. All aboard!

 

It’s All About the Kids

Foster’s passion is his students. He nurtures their creative tendencies, encourages their timid desires to follow a path inherent to their nature. No limits. To hear him tell it, I dare say the Evangelist relishes an opportunity to allay parents’ fears. They come to him, pleading, dissuade our child from pursuing art, their hopes and dreams for a better life for the next generation clouded under the pervading myth that artists are drunken bohemians who live out of their cars and survive on canned meat and free cheese. Parents are terrified, and frankly, so are most artists, once the illusion of fame and the romantic allure wears off and poverty wears thin. "The concept of starving artist doesn't play unless you're an idiot," the Evangelist says. So he begins his parent-teacher conferences. And then he asks:

"Name me one place in the world an artist has not already been." 

You can't. Even the moon, he’s quick to point out, has been touched by artists. The engineers who designed the space shuttle had to imagine the ship long before it could be built. 

"Everywhere we go, everything we do, everything we see has been touched by an artist," the Evangelist says. He's striking the impossible, and bush hogging a trail for a perfectly possible endeavor.  

His track record proves it. Over the last three years, one hundred percent of his students who applied to the Savannah College of Art and Design were accepted. This is a school that accepts something like 8 in 100 applicants only each year. Four students from the 2011 class are headed to SCAD, eight in 2010, ten in 2009 went to school there. Of college graduates in the field of art his former students live and work all over the world: two in New York as designers for Abercrombie and Fitch; one with her own design studio, Evigehden; one in L.A. as an animator who worked on recent films “The Green Lantern,” “Thor,” and “Captain America”; one designs toys for Disney; another procures art for Chase Bank in NY; another an architect, gives her time helping to redesign and rebuild the gulf after Katrina. His students have landed solid jobs in environmental design, industrial design, education, fiber design, fashion, graphic design, photography, architecture, procurement, to name a few. 

Not bad for a little public school in Alabama. 

And about that. Florence High School is presently poised to start an arts magnet school. Foster’s program is already the only one in the state to offer animation courses. The new school will take that seed of opportunity and grow it into an arts education competitive with many universities. The Evangelist sees the new magnet school, which will attract visiting artists in music, theatre and visual arts from the professional and higher education worlds, as the next best thing since Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. Can I go back to high school?

 

 * * *

 

As I stood to go, Jerry and I fell into a discussion about my current struggles with creating, direction, the why bothers hanging heavy off my aura. He said several encouraging things, but it was the final line he uttered as we hugged goodbye. "You are great," he said. "Everyone is." And with those simple words I felt the weight of ego wash away and the comfort of humility buoy me. I felt free to go and do and be. 

Pulling out of parking lot, something else echoed in my mind. "Thomas Edison found two thousand ways not to make a lightbulb." 

If The Art Evangelist decides to climb an open pulpit to preach the word of art, I may just find myself suddenly interested in the organized life.

"Art is a part of humanity, a part of who we are. We are divinely inspired to create beauty." - Jerry Foster, The Art Evangelist

 

she searches shark teeth at the seashore

The Ponte Vedra collection.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

earnest affirmations

Yesterday's Writer's Almanac from Garrison Keillor has impressed me this morning - how wonderful and coincidental to have Lahiri & White talk about their writing passions and their disinterest in fame on the same day I attempted sharing some reflections on the earnestness of being important - ahem, famous.

Monday, July 11 Writer's Almanac

 

"The challenge artists face today is whether to be an underground, unheard genius, or to dilute their art for the marketplace." - Cornel West

the earnestness of being important

A few weeks ago I told a friend, I want to write serious books. I'm going to write lots of serious books. It's an aspiration I've had for most of my life; to write serious books, to be taken seriously. But I've been thinking about that lately, peeling back the transparent membraneous layers of what it means to be taken seriously. It's a goal cast by the ego alone and fueled by the insatiable emptiness of a potentially wayward insecurity. It implies importance, fame, success. To be important is to be successful.

I had an English professor in college who told me once that everyone in their twenties wants to be famous, but it wears off in the early thirties, reality kicks in, priorities change. Truman Capote wanted to be a famous writer. When he began work on In Cold Blood he promoted the work before he ever wrote a word. It was going to be a new kind of writing, he said, a new way to tell a story. It would change the way people wrote. Maybe it did. But that story, non-fiction as it was, would not have resulted as it did without Capote's manipulative interference. I am not admonishing the work - I'm an admitted fan - but Capote elicited facts with a goal in mind, an ending molded, and never finished another book after that one. His thirst for attention was never quenched. 

Friend Tommy Martin has had a long, fruitful career in the entertainment business. He's produced and managed countless talents including James Brown, Roy Clark, La Toya Jackson and  Harry Carey, and rubbed elbows with countless more. Not one of them, Tommy tells me, ever got enough, be it attention, fame or money, the three so melded they might as well be one and the same. They hit the ceiling with their fame and acceptance, and then they dropped: drug abuse, bankruptcy, general disfavor. Tommy told me in a telephone conversation last week, "they just get bigger and bigger. They all get richer and richer. They already have everything." Many of them end up as the nobody they were in the first place, the nobody they were trying to escape. 

The audience changes. Styles refashion. Money is variable. Economies fall. Currencies crash.

When we look closely at the lives of famous artists the inherent self-promotion involved is obvious. Dali, Picasso, Warhol, Rubens (who had 50 artists painting for him) all spent countless hours entertaining, presenting a picture of eccentric, fabulous, untouchable fame. Picasso had a planet-sized ego, demanding his agent make him the most famous artist in the world. Mission accomplished. But he never outgrew that torrential anger or assuaged its dark source. He continued to bruise both wife and canvas.  

What about the work? For most of us it's the work that matters and it's the work alone that sustains us. That can't be only because we can not all be famous. If it were, there would be no artists. There would be more miserable restaurant workers around than we could stiff in a lifetime. 

Being important is an earnest business. It requires a conviction and a zealousness unmatched by the most devout Buddhists. Being famous is a full time occupation. So is the work. An essay here and there makes a passing hobby. A lifelong collection of finished pieces represents a diligence and passion of worth, noted or not. We're all we've got; the next closest solar system is 100,000 years away. We are so small, our egos don't even register.  

 

 

the garden in macro: new photos

I'm trying something a little different today: a midweek post. I've been thinking about all the photos I make, all the paintings I create, all the inspiration I run into on the web, in books, and elsewhere during the week, all of which stays inside these four office walls - for the most part. And maybe that's where it should stay. I don't know. But I want to share my work. My work has been clawing at my ego, share us! my work says. It's your blog, my ego tells me. You can do whatever you want to! 

 So we here at Amy C Collins have decided to introduce a new aspect on the blog: midweek posts! These might be photographs, artwork of various mediums, quotes or anecdotes, and links to other artists, designers, writers, and bloggers who are doing great work and sending inspiration out over the internet. Creativity's objective, after all, its mainline lifeline, is the sharing of ideas. 

These midweek posts can show up at any time between Monday and Friday and Friday and Monday, in multiples or singles, several times a week or every couple of weeks; it's a freelance brouhaha!

Don't worry about missing cartoon friday and The Column on Monday afternoons - they remain solid staples. 

And please, my loyal, regular readers, let me know how you like the new additions! Leave me a comment or send me an email. 

Now, on to the show...

the garden in macro: photos

I recently acquired a gently used macro lens (from friend and fellow artist/photographer Emily E.) These are some of my first shots.

 

echinacea, cranberry cupcake

 

echinacea, powwow white

 

lemon mint, an ornamental

 

pinta

 

pinta

 

young lavender, we're looking forward to next year...

 

 lantana

 

lantana

 

pineapple sage, a gift from friend, June

 

tiger lily, on its side

 

tiger lily

 

phlox, purple

 

foxglove, watch out! (it's poisonous)

 

foxglove, catawampus

 

monarda, jacob cline

 

cosmos, orange, wild, reseeded from last year

 

anise hyssop, me thinks...

 

blue speedwell, "deer resistant" (not true!)

 

twins

 

same as above, which I planted, but I don't know what it is...suggestions?

 

rose verbena

 

and rose verbena

 

 

*All images are copyrighted under a creative commons license. Please feel free to share or repost my work (link back to me!) so long as it is not for profit.

Copyright Amy C Collins

 

 

lightning and lightning bugs

Week before last I traveled home, in a matter of speaking. Mother and I spent a week at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, about an hour north of St. Augustine and thirty minutes East of Jacksonville, where I grew up. It was part medical conference (for Mom), part vacation (ocean front luxury), part revisiting a life before this one. 

My father still lives in Jacksonville, no longer in the house that was my home for the first 18 years of my life, but a few miles away in a skilled nursing facility (official description). Driving the familiar highway, subtle changes here and there - a new ramp, an altered exit - and the tree-lined streets of Riverside and Avondale, I was impressed that my old favorite restaurants were still up and running after sixteen years. I was comfortable navigating the old routes. Only a few landmarks have changed. And the afternoon summer sky still covers itself with dark clouds, like a haywire electric blanket it shoots out threatening crooked streaks of fluorescent white.

Of course, what's sixteen years but a drop in time. Don't misunderstand me, I've been back many times since I left and I have new favorite restaurants I manage to frequent on my returns. But I don't usually see old friends. And they haven't changed either. No one has. I find this mostly comforting. As my friend Denise, who I had not seen in eight or ten years, and I hugged goodbye, she said, whenever I see you I always know you're just going to be Amy. It was like no time had passed between us. We slipped right back in. At the end of the week Mom and I met up with my friend Randa, who I've known since the third grade, and her mother, Diane, also a friend. We had so much to say, the four of us talking at once, personalities still ebullient. I began to think I could live there again. There are so many people there who love me. I have so many connections. 

It takes six months to travel to Mars. It's a small planet, with a mass only 11 percent that of Earth's. But it sits on a tilt, giving it seasons like Earth, and there are traces of water ice buried in polar caps (which are mostly dry ice). Despite its cold temperatures (-125F to 23F) evidence that water ice, and maybe liquid water, exists sub-surface, suggests an entirely possible scenario; that four billion years ago Mars may well have had lakes and oceans. It may well have been teaming with life as we know it. Robert Zubrin, co-author of The Case for Mars, argues Mars could be inhabited again, by humans. He would like to see a crew travel up, establish a colony, as near in the future as 2020. It takes a flexible imagination to see it: the Red Planet Plymouth Rock. I can believe more easily that life on Mars has already existed, ancient history.

Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant believed he could solve all the problems of philosophy close to home. He never traveled more than fifty miles from his birthplace. In his most famous work, The Critique of Pure Reason  (1781), Kant wrote, "two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe...the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." If he were alive and young today, would he consider a trip to Mars? 

Home again, in Florence, it feels good to close the office door behind me, knowing the garden is on its mend, no longer neglected in my absence, the bags unpacked, laundry clean, immediate errands behind me (milk, cereal replenished) and my office straightened, inviting, offering solitude, ready for work. I turn on the lamp, the radio (a violin concerto plays softly), light a stick of Jasmine incense and sit back with a cup of coffee to mull over the pressing thoughts, ideas and threads of late. This is the beginning of my everyday vacation. It's like slipping into euphoria. 

Mark Twain said, "the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug." There are two homes. The home I'm from and the home I've adopted. One word, two weights, two sentiments. Jacksonville is my Mars. 

Walking home from Tim's the other night, through the halo of a street lamp, lightning bugs spotted the dark landscape. Fireflies hung about, gently flashing warm hellos, as if to say, welcome home.

 

Gathering Fireflies 

fabric on wood, approx. 24 x 24, by Shellie Karow Mitchell,

another old friend, and fellow artist. 

(original piece for sale on Etsy)