Is This A Real Apple?

The world is indeed a mixture of truth and make-believe Discard the make-believe and take the truth.

Ramakrishna
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Hello Buenos Aries. Have a happy day.
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Years ago I was an actor in a beer commercial. The scene was a party where we were all walking around chatting and having good time. It took an entire day to shoot the commercial which is about average. We all had glasses of beer in our hands. Because of the truth in advertising regulations then in effect it had to be the actual beer being sold in the commercial. But because we were working we couldn't actually drink the beer. And because of the hot lights for the cameras the beer soon became flat. So every now and then they would come around with a big bucket and we would pour the beer into it and get a refill. For a beer lover like me it was heartbreaking to see all that tasty beer going to waste.

On the stage and films there is a lot of make-believe. If there is a bowl of fruit or a bouquet of flowers all of it is artificial or the bright lights would soon rot the fruit and wilt the flowers.

There may be a scene in which a character takes an apple from the bowl and bites into it. In that case the actor has to be very sure he picks the real apple and not the plastic one. On the other hand, during "Greetings" I had to throw a baked apple on the floor. The other apples in the bowl were real ones so I had to make sure I got the make-believe baked apple or there would be a mess on the floor for people to skid in..

It's the same with liquor on the stage. It's water, colored water or tea. If it was genuine we would never make it through the third act.

Now you might say, Well, everything on the stage is make-believe, isn't it? And the answer is More and Less. On the stage the kisses are real but we shoot blanks. A fight is choreographed and rehearsed but the rage that brings two people to fight is real. It's that combination of the wig and the passion, the portraying the real life of a human being through art, that makes theatre what it is.

That is a condition that exists in all the arts. When you look at a painting you may see outlines, colors and brush strokes, but is that really what the painting is all about? It could be the painting of a bowl of fruit or a bouquet of flowers. But they are not fruit and flowers no matter how realistically the painter has rendered them. They convey to the earnest observer the essence of fruit and flowers, or even more the essence of one's experience with nature. Huntington Cairns said "Art is imitation, not of things, but of the nature of things."

Real artists are always peering more deeply into the nature of things so they can cast off the make-believe and paint and portray the truth.

DB - The Vagabond
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SPRING QUESTION

NASA has planned to send a two man mission on an 18 month trip to the planet Mars. It would take 6 months for the astronauts to get there and after 6 months of exploration another 6 months to return.

Should they do it and why, and if not, why not?

dbdacoba@aol.com

2 answers so far

I eagerly await your answer.

DB
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Careful Creativity 5/30/09

Art is imitation, not of things, but of the nature of things.

Huntington Cairns
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Hail, Important One.
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Many people get to the door of art and the appreciation of art and stop. I don't know, maybe they assume it's locked, or something.

I remember some episodes in my later years when younger actors would ask me questions about acting. I frequently said that acting, like any other art, has to conform to natural law. When queried about that once I picked up a leaf off the ground. It was autumn. The leaf had a beautiful thrust of green coming from the stem up through the center, then fanned out to a passionate red and onto to a cheerful amber at the edges, with each color blending with the others. I said that in order to be an artist we have to come up with something as beautiful as that leaf. But nature creates them by the zillions every year and then just tosses them away.

Why do artists paint pictures of leaves and flowers? Why did Gustav Klimt paint The Sunflower? It sort of looks like a sunflower. But it is really the essence of that particular one of a kind sunflower. As a result it is a magical work of art.

Mimicry, which is different from mime, has its place in the entertainment world, but it does not describe the essence of what is being mimicked. I've known of people who have normal, not unpleasant speaking voices in real life, but give them a script and they immediately start sounding like Katherine Hepburn, Marlon Brando or John Wayne. It's a terrible habit because it leads right up to the closed door on creativity. It has nothing to do with art.

Here's a simple example of what I think, but it illustrates the point. The Little Black Box. It was a small plastic box with a toggle switch on the top. If you flicked the switch to "on" the lid slowly opened a crack, a small emaciated arm came out; switched it to "off" and fell back into the box which closed again. When I saw it I thought, This is great. It's a humorous design to illustrate the dedicatedly depressed mind. It says "Leave me alone. I'm content in the dark crypt of my hermitage." It tells the story with a laugh. It's going to be around for a while. Next time I'm in here, I'll buy it.

A few weeks later I came back and there was the little black box. Only now there was a slot for a coin. When you flicked the switch the arm came out and pushed the coin into the box. "Gee" some unenlightened person said "that would make a cute bank." Cute. But it said nothing. One was a humorous expression in art of the universal metaphysical essence of defeat, depression and avoidance of life. The other was a bank.

The next time you look at a beautiful painting or witness an excellent performance remind yourself that you are looking at a window.

DB The Vagabond
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Throw some joy around.
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