Awriter in Wicker Park, widely published, wants to be a performance artist. A Chicago TV anchor, earning more than $1 million a year, says one of his biggest thrills came when he sold a story to a New York newspaper. A Hollywood actor, getting $4 million a movie, appears on stage for peanuts.
In every creative field, it seems, there are those who feel that real worth lies one field over. They feel anxious. Their gut tells them they are somehow lacking, unfulfilled, failing.
Such thoughts came to a reporter`s mind while pondering the ”1992 Creative People Awards,” now on display at Lorenzo Rodriguez Galley, 1178 N. Milwaukee Ave. Sponsored by Screen Magazine, a Chicago-based trade journal, the competition, in its third year, drew 400 entries from people working in creative departments of advertising agencies in Chicago and Milwaukee. It is apparent from the show, which runs until Aug. 31, that they yearn for more.
But why? Isn`t it enough to put in days drawing, say, bunny rabbits for cereal boxes-and take the money and run?
No, said Melinda Perrin, an advertising producer who organized the first
”Creative People” show in 1990. ”I was always impressed with the incredible art produced by those around me,” she said in an interview.
”There was a need to express their personal visions.”
Four nights a week and most weekends, Victoria Traudt turns on jazz in her River North loft, forgets about her work at Davidson Marketing and tackles her true love, canvases. She likes clouds, as did an early influence, Georgia O`Keeffe. She also does trees, often with human features, such as feet. ”I can go three hours at a stretch,” Traudt said. ”It seems like 15 minutes.” Corey Ciszek, an art supervisor at Leo Burnett, feels the same way. He spends his weekends working on furniture art at his parents` home in Barrington. Many of his pieces, done with considerable whimsy, look like tables or grandfather clocks. ”I make all the decisions,” he said. ”At work, there are 30 people telling me what to do.”
Carrie Nygren of McDonald-Davis/Milwaukee, who missed the opening of the art show because she was on an out-of-town shoot, often finds herself working through the night on pencil sketches. In contrast to her day work as a senior producer of commercials for retailers, insurance companies and hospitals, her private figures, often portraying women, have a floating spiritual quality.
When Bruce Cascia, an art director at DDB Needham, was in his senior year as a fine-arts major at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a professor briefed him on one reality of the art world: About 2 percent of serious artists make a living from their art alone. Cascia plunged into advertising. Now he works on campaigns for, among other clients, Wheaties, Yoplait and NutraSweet. Nights and weekends he paints at home in Glenview.
”For me, it`s entertainment, the way some people watch television to relax,” Cascia said. His giant oils, photo-realism visions of motorcycles against the mountains of Colorado, take one to two months of work and sell for $3,000 to $5,000. One, ”Home on the Range,” is in the show.
Cascia doesn`t regret that he never packed up and settled, with an easel, wife and child, in a Paris garret. ”We like being able to eat every day,” he said. Still, in not many years, Cascia plans to switch to full-time painting, backed by a nest egg.
”It`s very common, but it`s more than the feeling that something else is more worthwhile,” said Suzanne Cohen-Lange, who runs a Columbia College program that offers a master`s degree for artists who want to cross boundaries between art forms.
”People feel they have something to say. Their straight job, if you will, is not an arena in which to say it. Their other field-sculpture, art, performance or whatever-is where they get to say it. It doesn`t have anything to do with the numbers of people who hear it. It`s getting to say it.
”You make art because you have to. Or else you get stomachaches, or hives.”
Recent graduates of Cohen-Lange`s program include an elementary school teacher who has branched into performance poetry, a former Tribune reporter now traveling around the world as a free-lance photojournalist, and a public relations consultant who is writing plays.
Even those already involved in the arts-fine or otherwise-may feel that true soul is just around the corner. Movie actors like Alec Baldwin, who commands $4 million a picture, appear for substantially less in Broadway plays, such as the revival of ”A Streetcar Named Desire,” because the work has cachet. Robert Redford once was spotted nervously prowling a benefit at Hugh Hefner`s Chicago Playboy mansion, wondering how to approach one of his own heroes, playwright and political activist Lillian Hellman. Her work, Redford confided to friends, was ”important.”
Andy Warhol was a successful commercial artist in New York in the 1950s, but he, too, wanted to go deeper. He started drawing Campbell`s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles and Brillo soap pad boxes-for private collectors.
Classical musicians often admire the soulful vitality of jazz and rock. Their own music can have, as one flutist puts it, ”a kind of emptiness.”
Jazz and rock musicians, in turn, often yearn for the depths of classical music. Toni Schlesinger, a Wicker Park writer, has appeared at Ka-Boom!, a River West nightclub, in a performance-art assessment of marital estrangement. For many, this restless urge to tap one`s own creativity by moving into another field comes from what sociologist Christopher Lasch calls ”the void within,” an ache that biographer Paul Zweig once described as ”a persisting suspicion of personal emptiness which all my talking and anxious attempts at charm sometimes decorate, but don`t penetrate or even come close to.”
”It`s a matter of being underengaged. A person who is fully engaged doesn`t feel that way,” said Molly Daniels, a Hyde Park-based teacher of writing, poetry and playwriting whose students have included surgeons, detectives, therapists and business executives. One, a manager at a phone solicitation firm, recently wrote a play about a family Thanksgiving dinner conducted in the dark so that one sister, whom other family members despised, could be tricked into thinking that no one was home.
These days, Daniels said, her ”purer students” are into poetry.
”Even writing a bad poem is some kind of pure act,” she says. ”It comes from a more creative part of the brain. Nothing to do with buying and selling. You can carry a poem with you, into prisons or concentration camps. It can keep you sane. A poem has magical properties.”
Said Columbia College writing teacher Andrew Allegretti, ”Most of the people I see are not necessarily dissatisfied with their professions, but they feel they have something else they have, and want, to do.” Students in his novel-writing classes, he said, have included a patent attorney and a psychiatrist. Both came from fields that require writing and observation, but wished to express themselves in different ways.
”It`s the pitcher who wants to hit,” suggested WBBM-Ch. 2 anchor Bill Kurtis. He remembered ”the day in 1980 when I got a call from an editor of The New York Times, Michaela Williams, saying that their Sunday magazine wanted an article I`d written on Amerasian children left behind in Saigon-and planned to use it on the cover. It was one of the biggest thrills of my journalistic life.”
Cultural importance, of course, lies in the eye of the beholder. A recent New Yorker magazine cartoon showed a man in shirt and tie, sitting at a desk, telling a client: ”It`s the old story. I was in the middle of a successful acting career when I was bitten by the accounting bug.”
Older staff members at The Second City cabaret, 1616 N. Wells St., remember a garbageman named John Krzton who regularly showed up with old uniforms, funny hats, books, sashes, swords and other potential stage props that he had picked up on his daily rounds of the alleys.
”I am the ultimate critic,” Krzton once said, defining his own search for greater creativity. ”If I don`t like something, it`s gone forever.”
