Introducing: Cocteau & Colette at the Grand Véfour

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I am pleased to be performing as a creative hero of mine, Jean Cocteau, for a staged reading of a brand new play by William Emboden on June 23, at 7pm at the West Hollywood Public Meeting Room & Council Chambers (the brand new stage and multi-use space located below the library).

Making the play doubly exciting for me is the opportunity to perform alongside my longtime friend and artistic collaborator, R. SKY Palkowitz, who will be playing the French author, Colette. The play is an exploration of the close bond and friendship between these remarkable creative figures of 20th Century France. The special one-time production is also part of a two-month celebration of Cocteau’s artwork sponsored by the City of West Hollywood, and several rare pieces are on display in a gorgeous exhibition in the West Hollywood Library through July. I will be posting several blogs over the next few weeks about the show and the iconic figures — so be sure to check back in to JasonJenn.com periodically for more.

My own experience of Cocteau began many years ago while in college at the University of Iowa as a double major in Theatre Arts and Film. His name came up during my studies, although the time we spent on him was brief. In my theatre history classes he was mentioned as making posters and designing productions for the Ballet Russes. In my film history classes he was mentioned as making ground-breaking films like “Blood of a Poet”, “Orpheus” and “Beauty and the Beast”.

As I read up more about his diverse career, I was quite fascinated by just how many different creative outlets he had and as I discovered more about his persona, he became a hero for me in several ways. I was still newly coming to terms with my own sexuality at the time, he became an early example of both an openly homosexual man and creative force.

While I profiled him in a blog last year (see here) as a great example of being a “Jack-of-all-trades” his lover Jean Marais proclaimed that no matter what Cocteau did in his life, he was always a poet in those mediums. In interviews Cocteau believes that when he draws, he is making poetry with the strokes of the brush and in the lines of the pencil.

 It is both an honor and a challenge to embody the role of Cocteau for this production. There are several examples available of Cocteau speaking in interviews or within his own films.  He possesses a very distinct and unusual cadence in his voice, but more than merely imitating his style of speaking, I am given the task of interpreting his character for a modern audience who will mostly have very little experience. He can be a playful trickster of a man, who loves to entertain people with stories. He can also be deeply intellectual and serious. He was a larger than life at times to be sure and the line between characterization and human portrayal is a delicate one.

I am very fortunate to have the support of a beautiful script by Cocteau scholar Emboden, which possess many scrumptious lines befitting Cocteau in that they read like poetry. The process of doing this production is allowing me to become closer Cocteau, and I am quite humbled by the task of representing a man I so admire.

More to come about the other great figure of this play: Colette!

A Man of Many Colors - meet Bill Thierfelder

Photo by CLIFF SATRIANO, "Photo Stories, New York"

This week I continue profiling artist friends with a man whose philosophy and approach to life I admire as a fine example of a Jack of All Trades/Renaissance Man. His passion for contributing to the social good while pursuing a wide spectrum of interests sets a wonderful example for others, so I’m pleased to introduce Bill Thierfelder of Long Island, New York. This week some of Bill’s artwork will be featured at The Gallery at 40 South in Patchogue, NY - opening this Saturday, April 16. 

Bill has a long list of credits, but when I first met him I knew him more as the Professor of English at Dowling College and as a friend of a friend of a friend! Since that time I’ve discovered his many talents and gathered a respect for his philosophy and approach towards life, which finds it equally important to enjoy his artistic pursuits while giving back to the well-being of the community. He does this while maintaining a zest and curiosity for life. Over the years I’ve enjoyed gazing upon his colorful artistic pursuits, read some of his clever science fiction novels, heard him give well-researched lectures on historical figures, and cheered him on as he’s raised money and awareness for local organizations. Bill has continued to utilize his experience in new ways and continually develop himself through time, a key element for all Renaissance Men to embrace.

"Opus 5B" by Bill Thierfelder - January 2011

I put forth a few questions for Bill to answer to give a greater glimpse into this knowledgeable and well-rounded man:

1. How do you describe yourself as an artist?
Eclectic. Art, writing, and motivational speaking form the core of who I am as an artist--with occasional forays into music composition. These are the ways I “speak” to the world around me. (I also listen that way, too. Exploring art, reading, attending lectures, and listening to music all fill up the spiritual well.)

2. What are the main genres you explore as a Jack of All Trades?
Writing, Drawing, and Motivational Speaking.

3. What is your favorite medium to work and why?
In my writing, I love to experiment with narrative possibilities and multiple perspectives--viewing the same set of characters or incidents from multiple angles. Why? Because I feel connected to the idea of perceiving things in multifaceted ways. All this rooted in my study of phenomenology and existentialism. In my art, I enjoy using some of the basic “childhood” tools--crayons, markers, ink pens, and colored pencils. Art was one of my first loves and I continue to use the media I used back then.

4.  How do you organize your time to complete work? Any trade secrets to successfully being a Jack of All Trades?
I work on something when it feels right. Sometimes that’s in the morning, but most times it’s afternoons or evenings. When I create, I need to step away frequently and do other things and then come back, so I might end up working on a lecture for a library, a piece of art, and a short story all on the same day, switching off from one to the other with other things in between. So I guess you could say that I work in “sound bites” of fifteen minutes up to an hour or so before I switch off to something else. Fortunately, I switch gears easily because even though I may stop working on a drawing to head off to work on a story, the piece of art is still percolating in my head. Maybe a good comparison or metaphor might be choral singing. The complete work is really made up of sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses working together to create harmony. So art might be the sopranos, writing the altos, lecturing the tenors, and my other creative “stuff” (like cooking and gardening) the basses. I am the “complete work.” When you ask who I am, I’m those four separate voices working together to make a whole.

"Beethoven Piano Concerto 5" by Bill Thierfelder 2008

5. What and who have been major influences and inspirations for your work?
 I love William Blake who meshed his writing and his art into a unified whole. One worked with the other. My list of favorite writers is endless, depending on the mood. Toni Morrison, Walt Whitman, the English Romantic poets, Emerson, Thoreau, existential writers, and all those grand Canadian ladies: Shields, Atwood, Munro. As for art, my “temple” is the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I can wander the galleries for hours, absorbing everything I see. The American Museum of Natural History and The Metropolitan Opera have also been and remain favorite, important “watering holes.”

6. Do you have a story you would like to share about the circumstances behind any particular work?
 I think all my work--the drawings and the stories--are very much informed by my day-to-day feelings and ideas. I really don’t write or draw anything “autobiographical” in the sense that I re-tell specific incidents. But I use my feelings and ideas as a launching point. A lot of my sense of isolation over the years (some of it self-imposed for self-protection) can be found in the kinds of characters and plot lines I create. My need to organize and synthesize (which is rooted in the emotionally unstable life I endured as a child) can be found in all my art. On the surface, it’s an abstract, seemingly spontaneous and colorful explosion of vivid colors. But if you look carefully, you’ll see that each drawing is really constructed from intricate layers of geometric shapes and or repeated, intricate design “bytes.”

7. What is next for you?
 My work as an artist is getting increasing recognition--I’ve been shown in Manhattan and at two different Long Island galleries in just the first four months of this year. I hope to see that trajectory bloom. I also continue to write stories and keep submitting them; someday “the break” will come. I don’t write for myself; I want to share with others and create a conversation. And I love my motivational work shops called MAKING WINGS: LIVING DELIBERATELY--what better thing to do than to help people see that they are treasure, that they can live meaning-filled lives, and that within them are all the tools they need for spiritual, emotional, and physical contentment.


You can discover more about Bill Thierfelder on his website: http://www.makingwings.net/

And for more of the  photographer Cliff Satriano's "Photo Stories NY": http://photostoriesny.com

"Final Exam: Question Three" by Bill Thierfelder 2009

"Final Exam: Answer Three" by Bill Thierfelder 2009

JACKS & MASTERS / WIDTH & DEPTH

This week continues the debate over being a Jack of All Trades versus a Master/Specialist in terms of creativity and art. I received some great responses to last weeks post, with many people shocked that the historical phrase in its entirety really reads:  “Jack of All Trades, Master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one.” Funny how that  really changes the meaning - conspiracy anyone?

In a perfect world I like to think there is room for both Jacks and Masters, where both are equally valued for their expression and contributions. Another way to view the concept is to think about those characteristics in terms of width and depth.

A Jack of All Trades sets his/her vision wide. The Jack is a type of outward explorer, who makes discoveries and collects experiences that can be added into the mix and type of art they create.

A Master sets his/her vision deep. They hone in on a subject, going inward to discover rich treasures deep within, which adds layers of value and skill to their specific work. Both of these approaches are useful and important to utilize at different times in order to have a three-dimensional life!

http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/index.html

I think for some Jacks, going deep into any one subject can be challenging. Perhaps our minds get impatient, we receive new creative stimuli that spurs us on to a new project, or the labors of one direction don’t seem to be very fruitful at first so we switch gears. However, going deep in one direction and sticking to it serves to make a person better. It requires time and patience. I recommend picking up the book “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell. It probes into the subject of what makes a person a success, debunking a lot of myths and misperceptions we have about what it takes to succeed.

In one of his chapters he discusses the “10,000-Hour Rule” based on a study by Anders Ericsson, where anyone can become a so-called expert in a field once they have put in that much time.
He uses the Beatles as an example. Before the Beatles fame, they played over 1200 performances - some 270 of those times were from 5-8 hours shifts at strip clubs in Hamburg, Germany. Because they were playing the same music over and over, they had to develop their style and play with the songs in new ways to keep it fresh for them.

John Lennon believed “We got better and got more confidence. We couldn’t help it with all the experience playing all night long. Being foreign, we had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over.”

For a Jack who likes to do it all, it’s just going to take time, lots of it, but slow and steady wins the race, right? Note: I’m only about 9,950 hours away from becoming an expert blogger - although I've been writing blog-like email updates for many years, so maybe make that about 8,950 hours to go.

Several years ago I received a huge lesson on the importance of depth and the development of a series when it comes to making art.

Alexej von Jawlensky, "Schokko", 1919

I went to see an exhibit at the Norton Simon Museum by the artist Alexej Georgewitsch von Jawlensky, a Russian expressionist painter who was a key member of art movements known as The Blue Rider and The Blue Four. The artists shared a common desire to express spiritual truths through their art and were bold with color and form. Jawlensky is not as well known a name as his peers, Kandinsky and Klee. Which is likely because the Nazi’s deemed his work to be degenerate, which had more to do with his Russian background than his wild style.

Most of the works I saw in the exhibit were abstract and way ahead of their time (early to mid 1900’s). Also on display were a large number of similar paintings of an abstract face. I went from face to face and wondered to myself why he was so fixated on creating a series of works of what seemed to me to be rather boring and simplistic. Why did he have to do so many of them? Why not just make a few and move on to something else? I started to get tired of them and was beginning to lose respect after so enjoying his other works. Then I moved into a new room…and there on the wall before me was  a quote by Jawlensky that read:

“I knew that great art should only be painted with religious feeling. And that was something I could bring only to the human face.  I realized that the artist must express that within him which is divine. That is why the work of art is visible God, and why art is ‘a longing for God’”

The face  he was painting over and over was often called “Savior’s Face” - and represented for him the face of the divine. I then came to a final painting of the abstract faces on the walls, and I froze in place. Something about the painting glowed before me with a pure and undeniable spiritual energy. It was beautiful beyond my comprehension. I took a picture of it, but the digital image holds nothing of the original essence, so I won’t even try to show you which one moved me so. I'll just say that it was powerful enough to bring me to tears in humility and awe.

Had he not painted dozens of faces before this one, he wouldn’t have perfected the form and created the “one” that contained so much divine energy that moved me to tears in the way it did. By developing a series of paintings, he was moving deeper and deeper into the form. He wasn’t creating a very wide variety of works, but he was mastering the one form by going deep into it. Another quote of his on the wall explained that he was not interested anymore in his life to go wider in exploration, only deeper. The repetition of the face became a meditation for him and gave him further revelations about life.

So for all us Jacks out there, while I encourage us to be who we are and explore far and wide, I also encourage us to stop every so often and dig our roots down deep so we can experience the divine! And so that we may someday gift someone else the experience of bringing them to tears from the sheer and overwhelming divinity of art.

More to come!

JACK OF ALL TRADES, MASTER OF NONE… BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE!

Philippe Halsman. Jean Cocteau, “Jack-of all-trades”, 1948

This week I begin an ongoing and multi-faceted debate over the concept of a Jack of All Trades in the world of art and creativity versus a master/specialist.

First of all, I must admit I loathe that phrase, often because someone is using it to describe me. They think the use of such a platitude will inspire me to spend more time mastering one artistic form, but they’re really just annoying me because they’re missing the point: some people are meant to explore many artistic endeavors!  There’s a lot of evidence to show that being a Jack of All Trades/Renaissance Man is a genetic trait, and our brains are wired to respond to different stimuli. While there is much wisdom and truth in that phrase, because we might not be the best at any one genre, that’s not to say there aren’t wonderful benefits to being a Jack.

Jean Cocteau was an internationally acclaimed avant-garde artist of the Parisian scene probably best known nowadays for his novel "Les Enfants terribles" or his landmark black and white film "Beauty and the Beast" whose design style has been copied in many forms. In addtion to writing and filmmaking, he was also a very accomplished artist, playwright, poet, novelist, designer, and of all things a boxing manager!  A famous photograph of Jean Cocteau by Philippe Halsman even depicts him with 6 arms doing different things called "Jack-of-all-trades." You could say he was quite the Jack.

So was Leonardo da Vinci, with a long list of credits to what he spent his time doing. If he had merely stuck to being a mathematician and engineer, we would have missed out on several of the most iconic artworks of all time. However, it’s interesting to note that while he’s most known for his paintings, he actually only completed a relatively small number! He was constantly trying out new techniques that failed and was a known procrastinator! While he invented all manner of things and made some amazing discovers in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics, he failed to publish any of his findings! Still, do people cry out in anger for Leonardo being a Jack? He’s known as the quintessential Renaissance Man, and perhaps that distinction makes all the difference, for he successfully integrated his many skills and disciplines into a mastery of his own that many can admire beyond his lifetime. If he didn’t explore all his various interests and experiment widely, who knows if his works would have achieved the sublime level they are known for.

Leonardo's self-portrait

Now I am by no means elevating myself to the grand level of JC or LdV, but they're indeed men I admire and look up to in my quest to explore and evolve my many interests. I used to be quite proud of my excellent multi-tasking abilities, as if I were some kind of proficient juggler. But there is a lot of evidence now that while it may seem more productive to do more than one thing at once, it actually prevents people from getting things accomplished and at a lesser degree of excellence. Indeed, it can be maddening at times to be a Jack and feel like little progress is being made because everything has been worked on a little, but nothing finished. I want to do so many different things that my goals can seem to shift from one month to the next from a over-stimulation of creative ideas, and as I move on to the next hot project I leave another one behind, incomplete. I recently read a book called “Refuse to Choose” by Barbara Sher that opened my eyes to my situation and outlined some possible strategies that people can use to help maximize their own specific traits. I’m seeing dramatic increases in getting things completed - like my weekly blog!

http://www.barbarasher.com/

One of those techniques that I find most useful, is “The School Day Model.” Remember how you learned things in school? Did you spend an entire day studying math or history? No, you spent about an hour, then the bell rang, and you went on to the next class and next subject. The same principle can apply towards your creativity. Focus intently on one subject, one genre for a period of time, then take a break and go on to another subject. I find that writing for several hours, then shifting towards making art, then business matters, etc., works quite well. Instead of multi-tasking, I focus for short bursts at a time, just as we have learned to do since we were young.

Sher outlines a new way of categorizing people who are interested in a lot of subjects as “Scanners,” or people who like to scan a wide variety of interests. She also presents the strong case that the Cold War had much to do in the demise of the traditional Renaissance Man because the U.S. had a new mission to outrun the Soviets in the Space and Arms Race, which required people becoming specialists. People who became experts in their field have lead to major advancements in science and medicine that we’ve all benefited from. However, in some ways we’ve moved forward a bit too fast in that race, too fast in the constant advance of technology over human and natural rights. Perhaps we need some time to slow down and catch up as a society – for not every advance has been a step forward in the right direction. In the race to succeed, we’ve also burnt through a vast amount of resources and the planet and it’s yet to be seen if we haven’t dug our own graves as a results.

We definitely need Masters to take us farther than we ever thought possible, but we also need the Jacks to hone their abilities and to be encouraged to bring together their various skills to come up with practical, balanced applications. Jacks could be the hybridizers of the world, the ones who bridge the past wisdoms with future advances.

In researching this weeks subject matter, I also discovered that the above phrase was incomplete. The full phrase reads as follows:

“Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one.”

Are we living under some kind of conspiracy where the abbreviation was put in place by the “masters” in order to keep the “Jacks” feeling bad about themselves? Regardless of how we got to this point, the path forward is clear. We need to both width and depth in our exploration in order to map out a clear future. We’ll discuss more of that next week…