LITTLE ROCK — Who better to begin a conversation about the flash point of creative inspiration than an artist named Epiphany? Describing a recent high-concept concert he was mounting, the Little Rock rapper - real name: Chane Morrow - described its conception, a dramatization of independent rappers' tendencies toward imitating more famous acts and holding themselves back out of fear of failure, as a central idea to which other related ideas were attracted, like metal filings flying toward a magnet.
That image - reminiscent of that old backseat board game by which children paint whiskers on a cartoon face by moving metal flakes with a magnettipped wand - begged a question: Do other Arkansas artists have a magnetmoment, when a nucleus of an idea begins drawing other ideas, ultimately coalescing in a new creative undertaking?
When Arkansas artists representing various media - a lyricist, a poet, a painter, a poster designer, a fashion designer, an actor - were asked to describe their moments of inspiration, the conversations became miniature oral histories of creativity.
Chane Morrow, aka Epiphany, rapper
Morrow talks about the inspiration for his song "Be Cool," featuring JP, available on the Conduit Entertainment compilation CD Theme Muzik.
I always say the beat talks, as op-posed to forcing such-and-such song on a beat. The way the beat goes, it gives me the flow to it and it also gives me the concept for it. Sometimes it goes quickly, sometimes it takes a lot of time. A lot of times I start in the middle and I work out from there. I'll work out the ending, so I know, OK, it's gotta fit into the 16-bar format. How can I summarize so it's not getting to be this long narrative? With "Be Cool," the second verse was built around this one specific line, which is, "If plex what you 'bout, then I'd rather hear you breathing," with "plex" being a slang word for just kind of like, if you want to be all irritable and cause complications, I'd rather hear you just be quiet.
It was inspired by a true story in that it was in my whole casual dating period, and it was a cool night, we were riding down University [Avenue] and I made a joke that the girl took as an insult. I let people say stuff, but it takes a lot to get under my skin. It's like, it's 80 degrees outside, with balmy weather. I'm not about to drop you off home, but chill out a little bit. So I had this complete visual scene: I'm riding down the street, in my zone, she's just getting loud, and, really, if I have an option, I'd rather you just have no mouth, just kind of sit there and add to the ambiance. So out of that line came the whole rest of the verse: "The moon's out and it's a beautiful evening/if plex what you 'bout then I'd rather hear you breathing/So ease in the zone that you was on/that's child talk, girl, and you're looking too grown/so she admitted she was wrong for the beef/and I showed her life's better when you feeling like me."
So it's: Let me sum it up by saying, here's what I asked her to do, and she chilled out, and at the same time setting the mood so the listener can visualize the feeling I got. The first part of the song sets up the whole, you're riding around with somebody cool, having a chill evening, and then you bring in the conflict. I started the conflict, she continued it, then I ended it by saying, man, you're tripping. So by starting with that one line, it's like an inside-out kind of thing.
Miller Williams, poet
Williams talks about the genesis of two of his most beloved poems as the volume the 77-year-old calls his final collection of original work, Time and the Tilting Earth, is being prepared for a September 2008 publication by the Louisiana State University Press.
Almost all of my poems began when something happens that I can see or hear that embodies a conflict, but a conflict that gives it meaning. One of my most anthologized poems began that way. My daughter Lucinda saw a caterpillar going around and around on a bowl in the backyard, and after the caterpillar disappeared, she said, "I think he thought he was going in a straight line." It was very difficult not to take that as a metaphor for the human condition. It became a poem called "The Caterpillar." (Today on the lip of a bowl in the backyard/we watched a caterpillar caught in the circle/ of his larval assumptions)
All art takes its energy from irony, and every good poem carries a touch of irony. It's an irony that what makes us one separates us. And the most important thing I can say is that a good poem begins as the poet's and ends as the reader's: So a reader will say, when the poem ends, "Gosh, that's about me."
Another one was for a grandson, called "Catch With Reuben." He was already beginning to be a really good baseball player, and I had never been. And I wanted to be one with him, but this was not something that was going to do it, because not only was I ancient compared to him, but, as the poem ends, "no matter that your legs are short/your arms are small,/it will all be right in time./This arm that never threw a ball/far enough to make a team/if more than nine came out to play/threw one into your hands today/from nearly sixty years away." It's the conflict that gives that meaning, not just the love.
Morton Brown, muralist
Brown, an artist-in-residence at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, talks about his arrival at the scheme for a new mural in downtown Conway when charged with honoring the city's founding and its modernday status as a booming collegiate hub.
In community murals, it's very difficult to get into painting political figures. If you include someone, you make one group happy, and another group unhappy. But no one hates children, or at least they don't openly. My first attempt at rendering historical figures just seemed so old and dead and it went nowhere. So I guess what I did was go to the opposite extreme and went very young. Once I was in the realm of youth, then the ideas just started flooding through my mind. The kids were an epiphany on all sorts of fronts. The community really wanted to see a railroad, because it was important to the founding of the city. I literally could not figure out how to put that and the concept of being an education-oriented town in the painting. But then it was, hey, I can make them playing dress-up, then they can be dressed up from different time periods, then they could be playing with a train set. They were the perfect symbols for rebirth,the educational passing on of knowledge, new growth rising from the shoulders of the past - literally. I was able to crunch all that information into a more fantastic scene, that hopefully would be enticing for children and adults. The one kid that always stayed the same in my mind was the flying kid. She's also now called Aurora - the title of the piece is Aurora Rising - and her pose was set even before I first painted the figure. The pose, with the cape and the arms outstretched, stayed the same throughout the whole process. The cape changed; it became an Arkansas Traveler quilt, then it became my daughter, then it became my daughter with pink glasses on. I toyed with a Superman pose, but didn't really like it because of the square nature of the wall, but I wanted her flying, and with her arms up on one side, that made the best use of that space. Everything about it was always as if she was just about to take off. Kids can be doing anything, so it was very liberating to get into that realm.
Paul Michael Dellostritto, graphic designer
Dellostritto's poster designs promoting concerts at Little Rock's White Water Tavern areoften pilfered from bulletin boards before they can do their job of advertising the show. He talks about their origins and their relationship to two recent seminal setbacks for him - the crash of his hard drive, destroying four years' worth of design work and art photography, and his life-threatening attack at the swimming pool of a Little Rock apartment complex by a man wielding a samurai sword, an incident still under investigation by the Little Rock Police Department.
Everything starts from scratch. It's a blank canvas every time: I start out with my 11-by-17 document with my quarter-inch bleed, and from there, it can go lots of different ways. I can start with the typographical treatment. Or it starts with this one really killer image I think would work. I'm not an illustrator, I'm not a crazy conceptual kind of artist. I like to take the almost collage aesthetic and piece together these concoctions. With the show posters, I don't have to be all that literal. For example, one I did for the band San Antokyo was a really crazy cattlehead illustration which was like - OK, cattle, Texas; it's literal. I could have taken it another step further and made it really cliche and do this Japanese burst thing going on behind it, but I try to stay away from being too campy.
Definitely, though, when I went into that dark period, it was just blatant; everything just turned out dark regardless. One poster I did for Roger Hoover and the Whiskeyhounds, they're not really a dark band, but the poster ended up being that way. I didn't know anything about the band, I just knew the style they were, that kind of alt-country or whatever you want to call it. The main graphic was this kind of hybrid of a snarling dog head with another dog head coming off of its body, to represent whiskey hounds, snarling for - whether it's whiskey, or crowd attention, whether it's just being out and about doing something, being live - being alive at that point, it was a momentum kind of thing. And it worked. I have one person to really please with these posters and that's Matt [White, proprietor of the tavern], and whether he wants to put it up or not. It leaves me creative freedom. Is it applicable all the time? No, but nothing is.
Korto Momolu, fashion designer
Momolu talks about the deep roots of her fall line, available in the Little Rock boutiques Box Turtle, Jeante and Faux Pas.
My daughter has a pair of earrings, made of 24-karat gold, that a friend of mind from Ghana gave her. They're tribal symbols that I've done before, just doing them - not thinking they meant something. But then I began focusing on them and really being true to what they really where. I ended up putting them on the backs of several of the designs. Now they actually have meaning. There's the moon and thesun; depending on what the symbol is it has to do with your age and your sex, your status in your community. I just kind of copied the shapes from the earrings. My friend is from the Ashanti tribe. They have so many different symbols; these are the more mainstream. I didn't want to get too deep into it since I'm from Liberia, not Ghana. In the purses in the collection, I have horn handles. Horns might have been used as weapons, or in some cases as glasses to drink from, depending on your hierarchy in the tribe. So by incorporating the horn as the handle of the purse, I'm also jokingly saying, it serves as a purse, but if you get attacked, you have a weapon right there.
Whitney Kirk, actress
Kirk, a Cabot native and former Miss Arkansas, talks about preparing to step into the role of free-spirited newlywed Corie in a production of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park, playing at the Arkansas Repertory Theatre through Nov. 11.
I start by reading the play. I know that seems really simplistic, but I read it over and over and over again, at least once a day. Then once I get up and start to say the words out loud, I ask, does this feel right? Does this make sense? Does it make sense in the moment? I'll read the stage directions once, but I probably won't read them ever again. If it says to "sarcastically" deliver a line, well, what if I feel sweet? Or what if I feel downright mean, and not sarcastic? So as far as creating a character, I bring something different to the role than any other woman would bring. That's pretty much my prep work beforehand, besides looking up all the references that I may not know, like Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Before being cast in Barefoot in the Park, I did not know who that was. He was an actor who was very popular in 1963. There's a line, "He looks nothing like Douglas Fairbanks Jr." I had to look him up to see, am I saying this person is adreamboat, or not? Since this is 2007, I'm a little bit more familiar with 1963 than if it were set in 1763, in Hungary. I would have to do a lot more research. As far as the physicality of the role, sometimes props were introduced where we did have to have lessons. There are these special ice trays - I don't even know what they're called - but they have a handle on them. Luckily, it's not a play about ice trays.
I specifically chose not to watch the movie. I know that one of my tendencies is to shut down my natural impulses, and I didn't want to marry myself to Jane Fonda's impulses. Another thing is, and this sounds really simplistic too, is just to breathe. To prevent me from shutting down my impulses, or if I notice that my mind is wandering and I'm starting to judge myself, is to take that inhalation and let the inhalation provide the inspiration for the next moment. I have to practice that a lot.
Style, Pages 61, 62 on 10/28/2007