Posted: Jun 23, 08 2:15pm
The only rule in this discussion is that you can't promote yourself, which I know can be hard when so much of what gets us notice is shameless self-promotion.
The most genuine artist I never knew was and is Seattle's Duff Hendrickson. He was from Tacoma when I met him, lived in a little studio so packed with paintings that he couldn't pull down the Murphy bed. he stayed thare because he was grandfathered in for rent control.
While he did various abstract and impressionistic pieces, his real passion was in advancing film as a common art form. His celluloid masterpiece "Strange Day on Maui" received an AFI showing in LA in 1973, I believe. He used to sell VHS copies of it through personal ads in various publications. The Jimi Hendrix estate has since made this true epitome of American pop culture at the time unavailable.
He still had a film called "As if Picasso Were on Acid", which is about the only way to describe it.
Around 1989 he decided that the future of animation was digital. He broke down and got a real job that would teach him the basics of video animation. as soon as he'd secured an old Amiga computer for himself, he went back to his art.
I could give many other examples of his shows, events, and general creative concepts, but this is where the main reason I consider him the most genuine artist I ever knew comes in.
After getting the Amiga he got back to the so staarved-for-cash phase (worse than I'd seen before) that he went to bars at happy hour for the free hors d'ourves as about his only diet. He barely kept up his rent.
I'd see him every day, as he worked on his first great Amiga computer epic, "East India" in which he took scanned photos of East indian sculptures and manipulated them slowly, at the excruciating pace of a raga in the background. We're not talking action movies here.
He told me about it every day, but I still hadn't seen any of it. One night he'd created something so cool he wanted to show me. I followed him to his place, watched a 30 second segment on his computer.
It was real cool -- but short. He had no more, with all that he'd worked on for months. He'd stayed up every night creatinggreaqt effects just to have to erase them when he shut off the computer, or started another part of the idea.
He couldn't afford disks to save his work, but he did it anyway. That is art for art's sake. He went ot a couple of years later to have a public showing of his computer animations "East India" and "If I Were Vincent Van Gogh, I'd Kill Myself."
A lot has happened since then. Some of his work since is on MySpace under a user name Cosmo Spacey.
