Who is your greatest inspiration? Are you a writer or an artist?
I'm an artist, yes. Answers of this sort can seem trite, I'm aware. However, I would say that more and more in life the concept of interdisciplinary study seems valuable to me. Poetry can really influence your music or painting can influence your writing, etc. There's a such an overwhelming amount of great art, I don't have a single influence as some devoted people might. I want to just make a list of 500 names, but will substitute this short, conventional group.
Since you were kind enough to ask I will list a few people I like.
1- Mark Rothko - While I love Rothko's art it was much later in my life that I started reading about him and his personal life. While on the surface he's an over-sensitive, guarded, somewhat troubled man with many biases of his era, the aspect about him that I have found very inspiring is that he had an idea in his head and nothing on earth could shake his belief. In fact, for a somewhat complicated ego, unlike a lot of artists, his ego did not really enter his painting in the conventional way it often does. Rather, he believed so much in the idea, he felt that his paintings were beyond criticism; That the journey of communication with the viewer was such a powerfully sound idea, that it could not be taken down by fashion or critique. Rothko overcame is own weaknesses as an academic artist and did nothing but refine his own style, endlessly painting or considering painting with a devotion to the content of the work we all could learn from.
2- Anne Sexton - is someone I read from a fairly early age. Especially in her first few books, her command of language and boldly original style are well known, but personally, I think I had never experienced that sort of rawness of emotion in art. The "work as confessional" may have entirely ruined art itself in later times, but her craft was so masterful and her force is so irresistible, I was powerless.
3- Bob Dylan - Dylan is such an icon it's popular to take him down and he has a large and confusing catalog as sometimes his best work remained unreleased for decades. The thing with Dylan (and Cage for that matter) is that they so profoundly changed every aspect of 20th century music, that it's not really even a matter of "Like" but that you are influenced by the whether or not you even know it. Anyone who ever wrote song and wanted to be taken seriously owes a major debt to Bob, who if nothing else, legitimized the whole idea. I enjoy him because, good or bad, I never feel like he's trying to put one over on you and also 'cause
"Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear
Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer
And the sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way
To ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay"
I mean, that's not most pop songs.
4- Andrei Tarkovsky - No one else can film a dream.
5- Marcel Proust - if you like ideas, Proust has them. I think, you have to be ready to read him. It didn’t make sense to me the first time. But when I became more familiar with the illusory qualities of life, I found no one more fascinating. I think about his words all the time.
6 - Bill Traylor - has really impressed upon me how mythical the properties of art are. Something simple can be so saturated with feeling and charm, it’s dizzying to try to explain why. And perhaps, people like Traylor who are purely expressing themselves without a conscienceless of commerce or audience, unload the art experience from academia in a way that’s something to behold.
7 - The Velvet Underground- When my sister was in College, she had a roommate who heard voices and played “Murder Mystery” a lot. I had never heard music like that. The feeling I got was that you couldn’t hear the playing, just the song. The Velvets are the opposite of many things we hate in music. They are fiercely artistic and experimental, visionary really. I need no greater defense than Lester Bangs on this:
“Dear Mr. Bangs, you have publicly thrashed a hero of mine, and I would like to put you in your place. […] you have the nerve to lump Duane Allman together with the Grateful Dead, saying all he did was to have the “stamina to play scales for an hour or two.” When it comes to making a list of instrumentalists of any kind who have played with true visceral passion you can bet that Duane’s name will be there near the top. […] You have done a great man a great public injustice. Take it back or else.”
Bruce Piscitello Easton, PA
“You’re right. Duane Allman was a great guitarist. I hate guitar. The greatest guitar solo ever was Lou Reed on “I Heard Her Call My Name.” This is the same man who took a Gibson L-5CEF Guitar (bought 40% off at Manny’s for $1,659 tax included) and plugged a soldering iron into it just to see how it would sound. That’s rock and roll.”
Lester Bangs Musician Magazine, August 1980
8- Yasujirō Ozu - Ozu’s movies are dear to me. The composition of the shots, yes, but it’s the elegance and simplicity of everything on its place that comes together to make the films emotionally effective. I watch “Tokyo story” as a palate cleanser to re-visit art that is retrained and refined rather than a blathering noise of style points.
9- Angela Davis - so accurately articulated the struggles of being someone who was oppressed by society, it simply changed my mind on a lot of things. I remember seeing her on TV in some rebroadcast of what is now one of her famous interviews from prison. I lingered on the interview at first frankly because I fund her to be such an electric kind of presence and I thought she was such a beautiful woman with great style, but then listening to the import of her words was really life-changing because so is so adept at explain the personal nature of oppression.
10- Gwendolyn Brooks - I don’t cry as much reading Brooks as I do reading Baldwin but her hot-rodding of language is an instruction manual for any artist. She’s another in a long list of great writers that astound me with just how precise you can make a fundamentally imprecise language.
11- Nehemiah Curtis "Skip" James - For me, there is no music as haunting as the 1930 Skip James recordings. The mystery of Robert Johnson pales by comparison.
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