My Top Five Artists

I thought today I’d take a little time to honor some important artists… ones that have influenced me strongly in some way. Men who I’d like to have dinner with, whose talent I’d like to have, whose paths I’d like to follow. Thanks for showing the way, gentlemen, even if I fail in following your precedents as closely as I’d like…

1. Clive Barker – Clive is the artist all artists should want to be like. He’s done it all, and every step of the way he’s had a devoted following who has backed him and bought into his twisted/true visions. The appeal of his art stretches across all strata of people: men, women, young, old, white, black, straight, gay… and from what I’ve seen the three times I’ve met him in person, he’s a gracious man who takes nothing for granted and gets out there and talks to people because he genuinely wants to hear what they have to say, and find out how his work has drawn them all together.

Clive started as a playwright in his native Liverpool, England, and his friends in the theater troupe they created (“Dog Company”) have stuck with him until the present. He wrote short stories between plays, and got noticed by the publishing community, ushering the gothic horror story garishly into 80s with The Books of Blood. Then he moved to Los Angeles and started making movies as well, getting the Hellraiser and Candyman franchises on their way – although he would disown then when they fell prey to that other unfortunate byproduct of the 80’s… the horror movie sequel machine.

Instead, Clive started working on novels… huge, sprawling masterworks of imagination like Weaveworld, Imajica and the two books (so far) of The Art. Something I like about the tales of people like Lovecraft and Stephen King is how there are themes, places and characters that overlap, but I also admire how Clive can create entirely separate, whole universes with completely different mythologies. He seems to have no limit to his imagination; he renewed a multimillion dollar publishing contract just by giving the *titles* of his next four books, for crying out loud.

Right now he’s working on one of the most ambitious projects of his life, The Abarat Quartet (which I now hear has expanded into five books), in which a girl named Candy Quackenbush finds herself traveling through a mystical world, and each book is illustrated with hundreds of original paintings Clive created as he found his way into the story. Amazing. Clive lives and breathes art, and can only hope that someday I’ll have a life that will afford me the same luxury.

2. Carl Sagan – Carl was the ultimate scientist, a man who was open to all possibilities -– as long as it was scientifically provable -– and brought ideas to the masses in a personal, organic fashion and valued the need for science to be presented in plain English. People who had never taken a science course in their lives could listen to Carl (for example, on his many appearances on The Tonight Show) and understand what he was trying to explain. That’s the rarest talent for a scientist, who necessarily lose themselves in the tiny details of one particular field. Carl loved it all, and while he was sometimes criticized as a dilettante, that encompassing love translated into the way he spoke to people.

His passion for science reached me when I was only 8 years old, when he starred in his PBS series Cosmos. I remember watching it on 13 consecutive Sunday nights in the summer of 1980, completely enraptured in the thoughts and ideas he put forward about astronomy, math, history, biology, physics, time travel, space travel… all of it rooted in real theory. Carl showed me that the Universe is an infinitely beautiful, infinitely delicate balancing act between order and chaos, and we have a privileged vantage point because we get to see and understand so much of it.

Carl also gave me an important credo I still live by -– “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. My mind is open enough that I would *love* to believe in alien life and paranormal phenomena, and I absolutely will if it can be proven. In a world where we can create everyday wonders by manipulating atoms and energy, there shouldn’t be anything we can’t potrentially examine and understand.

While there are wonders out there that we can’t possibly understand, he believed that we *will*, one day. I can’t think of a better tribute to him than the fact that I believe it too.

3. Stephen King – In 1985, I read the opening novella of King’s story collection Skeleton Crew. It was called “The Mist”, and affected me like nothing I had ever read before. By the time I finished reading it, I was horrified and sad, thoroughly creeped out and completely unable to stop reading. And I’m still going, over twenty years and tens of thousands of pages later.

What makes King’s style so readable to me? No one can get inside a character’s head the way Steve can. His characters are so *real*… their voices are like ours, full of their own internal shorthand thoughts, the little in-jokes we have with ourselves, and it makes it that much more resonant when those characters run smack into The Unknown. And they do… whether it’s a huge mass of tentacles out in the mist, or a shape-shifting creature that lives in the sewers and takes the forms of your worst fears, or a particularly vicious ghost that dwells in forgotten hotel room.

And then there are the tantalizing crossovers… most of them revolve around his epic seven-book (soon to be eight-book) series The Dark Tower, which is a cross between Spaghetti Westerns and modern fantasy, where Roland, the last of a line of knight-like “gunslingers”, undergoes a mythic quest across times and worlds to save the Dark Tower (which is really the linchpin of all creation) from being destroyed by The Crimson King, an act which would not only result in the collapse of Roland’s universe, but the collapse of all possible Universes, including worlds where many of King’s other books have taken place. There are at least 3 other novels of his that are basically Dark Tower books, only not in name, and the main villain turns up in other guises in even more. It’s all one big Universe, and all things are connected. That’s yet another way that King’s literature is like life.

4. Orson Welles – The first thing I remember seeing Orson do was a narrating job for a TV special about the treasures of Tutankhamen’s tomb back in the ‘70s. I just remember being amazed by this imposing guy with a cool salt-and-pepper beard wandering around a museum exhibit and talking about the pharaoh’s treasures in a deep, ominous voice. I didn’t know that what I was watching was the sad, lackluster end of a artistic career that started out as one of the most promising anyone had seen before or since.

When I first knew him, Orson was a narrator of TV specials and commercials, and a frequent guest on the Tonight Show who could do a magic tricks and weave tales of old Hollywood better than anyone else could. From there, I started learning more about him, about how he started out as a wunderkind of the theater, working with John Houseman to produce amazing Broadway spectacles such as the “voodoo Macbeth”, done with an entirely black cast from Harlem. He moved into radio, not only being the star of many classic shows like “The Shadow”, but creating his own Mercury Theater Playhouse that brought stories of classic literature to radio life (the most famous, of course, being his fake-documentary version of War of the Worlds that frightened a nation one Halloween). Then he went straight into film, and co-wrote, directed and starred in Citizen Kane, one of the most enduring and technically dazzling debut films ever made.

Everything he touched, it seemed, turned to gold. He could do no wrong… and then it all fell apart, almost as quickly as it began. His films, although still amazing, never had the popularity they deserved, and he didn’t help the situation by wandering off to other projects before seeing the previous one through, and as a result we are left with half-baked “studio cuts” of could-have-been classics like The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil, and Mr. Arkadin. He finally ended up as I saw him in my childhood, overweight and tired, frustrated at how he had to take bottom-of-the-barrel roles to pay his bills and finance the occasional film that he could scrape together.

I think I identify with folks who have more than a few choices of things they can focus their talent – it’s hard to stick to one thing when your creativity is pulling you in several directions at once. Orson seems to be a living cautionary tale about this very thing, what can happen to you if you don’t settle down and choose a path. I also admire the way he dove into everything he did… he lived his life large before that phrase was even coined. He burned through fortunes, ate huge meals, married movie stars like Rita Hayworth, and really *lived*. Unfortunately, for all his accomplishment, his life ended up as a mostly-failed experiment, less than everything he could have been.

I think it’s just as valuable as lesson to learn from than those who succeeded.

5. David Lynch – You’d never know what David Lynch’s art is like from looking at him. He’s an Eagle Scout from Missoula, Montana, whose biggest vice is coffee and cigarettes, and who always fastens the buttons on his shirts all the way up to the top. You’d never know the stories that come from the depths of his mind just by looking at him. But the contents of that mind are summed up in the first minute of Blue Velvet, where a man watering his front yard suddenly has a stroke and falls over onto his perfectly manicured suburban lawn. The camera draws in close to him, then drifts underground near where he lies. There are countless ants there in terrible close-up, their feet and mandibles clicking, the sound growing deafening as things get darker and darker…

Lynch’s entire career has been built around this notion, that there is darkness and madness beneath the normal life that we try to lead. So many of his films and TV projects (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Lost Highway, Wild at Heart, Mulholland Drive) deal with the peeling back of normal life to expose what’s really going on behind the scenes, and it’s never a pretty picture.

I’ve always been the kind of person who loves the idea of huge, overarching plots where everything means something, and Lynch’s is the closest I’ve ever come to seeing exactly that. Granted, it doesn’t always work out that way, but the beauty of a Lynch film is that you *feel* that everything is following some sort of dream-logic, even as the most bizarre things are happening.

What Lynch has shown me is that you don’t have to be a rebellious nihilist to tell stories that are full of sex, violence, and madness. David doesn’t even *swear* as far as I know, but he created Frank Booth, the most venomous, foulmouthed character to come out of 80’s cinema. And he also is a fascinating example of how you should follow your creative instinct, no matter where it leads. He’s notoriously vague about what his films *mean* -- he has never done a DVD commentary, and doesn’t even like his films to be split into “chapters” because he thinks movies are spells that you should experience all the way through in one sitting -– and to tell the truth, I don’t even know if *he’s* aware of he’s doing. A typical quote about how he makes a movie is something like: “A film is all about mood, and you just try to maintain that mood.” Still, he follows his muse faithfully, and never questions it, and I truly admire that.