Creating Connections Across the Arts: Artistic Counterpart of the Scientific Search

There have been times in history that are famous for artists-designers-architects-writers-dancers-musicians-theater folks coming together. These nexus in time have always hummed to me.

If I were to step into a time machine, I would set the dial to the Arts and Crafts Movement (late 1800s and early 1900s), or perhaps the Paris Left Bank in the 1920s (see the new graphic novel “The Left Bank Gang), and then jump to The Harlem Rennaisance of the 1920s and 1930s and so on.

Throughout my life, I’ve sought to create a synthesis of the arts in my work–to bring art forms and artists together.

Daniel Holland and I achieved this in our old-fashioned Comedy Variety Review show, “Comedy on Tilt” in Northern California. We featured skits, stand-up comics, dancers, singers, storytellers, and instrumentalists in the community shows we presented for three years running.

In my first art show “Celebrating and African Experience,” I achieved this connection across the arts as well: a body of work that embraced 20 large paintings on cloth, accompanying stories, chants, dance movements, and community rituals.

Many artists dream this dream and live it. They infuse themselves in a variety of art forms or perhaps a variety of media for making visual art…in hopes of creating a new kind of art…of break-through as a result of synthesis and finding new hybrid forms. This is the artistic counterpart of scientist seeking new life forms. For artists know that art is a life source, properly persued.