Wandering Artist's Journal

This past Sunday I saw the Rockwell Kent film which showed at the de Young Museum . It was three hours long - a fact that was not revealed to us until right before the movie started. Maybe they were afraid no one would come. Which might be true, since there were only about a dozen people in the Koret Auditorium, for this one and only showing, even before it was announced how long the documentary would be. A mathematician sitting in front of me (or was he a physicist - he was scribbling formulas* on the program) got up at the announcement and headed up the aisle, muttering and shaking his head. But most of the rest of us stuck it out. I was glad I did. I was never bored, but I'm afraid this movie might need further editing before it's ready for prime-time. My main impression after the movie finished was that Rockwell Kent perfectly illustrates the saying of the philosopher Seneca , " Life is long, if you know how to use it ." Regardless of how you feel about his polit...

I just saw the (2005) movie, " World's Fastest Indian " which is a true story about an eccentric, intensely focused guy, Burt Munro, who breaks the world land speed record on a (modified) motorcyle. He spends his entire life on this project. This movie made me think of the artist's pursuit and the joys (and pain) of the artist's life. The movie was directed by Roger Donaldson , who made an earlier (1971) documentary about Munro called, "Offerings to the Gods of Speed." He spent 20 years trying to get the newer movie made. Both the filmmaker and the subject of the film have a lot in common with the better artists that I know: obsession, passion, and a tendency to inspire envy in onlookers. One young man, interviewed in the 1971 documentary, says about Munro, "I envy him, I envy his life, because he does what he wants." Munro is envied, in spite of the fact that he lives alone in a one room shack (essentially a workshop with a cot.) He actually ...