The world needs and depends on both specialists and generalists in every intellectual endeavor, including the fine and performing Arts. Since my earliest years I seemed destined to be deeply involved in the Arts, but it has become increasingly clear to me – and to the people who know me well – that I was never born to be a specialist.
Temperamentally, I’m unusually well-suited for immersion in many art forms. I love to explore the connections between them. For me, the fine and performing Arts are an immeasurably vast, magical playground for those of us who cannot help but express our lives through music, the visual Arts and the written word. After many months of pondering over the dilemma of how I might more accurately describe my wide-ranging work in the Arts, I finally settled just last year on the term “arts multiple” as a way to describe myself to publicists and other people involved in or interested in the Arts community. I employ the term not in conversation but in writing. For me it offers a more positive, more constructive counterpoint to that pervasive, often pejorative idea that someone like me is little more than “a jack of all trades but master of none.” People who don’t specialize in any one endeavor are often thought to be “all over the place.” We don’t appear to be capable of “settling down” and “finding our destiny” in any one activity. Intellectually, it may appear on the surface of things that we have yet to “grow up,” either intellectually or creatively.
For some of us, the process of growing up intellectually and creatively can be a dangerous path that may very well lead to creative stasis. Even worse, it can lead us to work from a certain smug presumption that we’ve “arrived” and “learned everything there is to know” about our particular discipline. If that’s what growing up means, then I am thankful that I’ve yet to reach that maddeningly elusive goal.
I’ve been a free-lancer in the fine and performing Arts for as long as I can remember. For many years I’ve listened as people allude to me as a “Renaissance Man.” It started in earnest after I moved from the Midwest to New England, degrees in music and English literature in hand, without either formal employment or connections of any kind. Being quite incapable of remaining idle for more than a few minutes, I immediately found ways to be active as a writer, actor, musician and public speaker.
I wrote a weekly column for a local newspaper, addressing various social issues and reviewing books. I joined the pit orchestra of a local playhouse, acted in plays in Maine and New Hampshire and founded my own teen theater for which I wrote, produced and directed the musical comedies.
In the mid 1980s I founded Artful Endeavors, a consulting service for creative people in all walks of life. Since then I’ve gotten even more active in my creative work. In 1995 I became a professional picture framer, and four years later I founded an art gallery, the Franklin Gallery, adjacent to the frame shop I manage.
In that same year I got serious as an artist and began exhibiting my works in several media – drawings, paintings, photographs and found object assemblages – in galleries in Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Since then I’ve been exhibiting my art in group and solo shows ten or eleven months a year.
I’m active in art associations in Newburyport, Massachusetts (where I coordinated the abstract artists’ group in 2010) and Kittery, Maine (where I’ve founded a similar abstract and experimental artists’ group, the Seacoast Moderns, to serve southern Maine and Seacoast New Hampshire).
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