WHEN LIFE <i> IS</i> ART

Usually they’re uncommercial. Sometimes they’re over-rated. Almost always they’re unappreciated. But these creative mavericks make art their way because they ‘have to do it.’

Curtis Gutierrez grew up helping his father haul junk and paint signs. When Gutierrez began idly sketching to combat the boredom of his grade school homework, his father would gently guide his hand across the paper to complete the design.

That wasn’t the only legacy Gutierrez received from his father. There was his 30 years of knowledge and experience working with industrial materials, which became the cornerstone of Gutierrez’s painting style. Today, although few people buy Gutierrez’s work, his desire to paint is so strong that he never considers quitting.

Iby Duba was 5 years old when her singing soothed the fears of friends and neighbors huddled in a Budapest cellar during a World War II bombing raid. That experience started Duba on an artistic odyssey that led her from appearances at one of Vienna’s most prestigious opera houses to culture shock in Times Square and a one-woman show blending her classical training with a spiritual message. She receives no money and little public recognition for her performances; Duba says her reward comes from the lives she touches through her singing.

Wanda Coleman had a prized foothold in the Hollywood script world 10 years ago as part of the team that earned an Emmy for writing the soap opera “Days of Our Lives.” She then returned to the 9-5 business world to support her three children, and to focus on her poetry--free from the restrictions and distractions of commercial writing.

Gutierrez, Duba and Coleman are worlds apart but one element unites them: a maverick vision. Whether by circumstance or design, their creative quest has landed them outside the Los Angeles artistic mainstream.

Their aesthetic passion compels them to express that vision even though the prospects for reward are slim. That isn’t to say that they are purer or any more passionate about their work than commercial and/or critically successful artists; only that they are a part of the creative world, even if their work is seldom seen or written about.

“There is something in one that’s a form of madness because you just have to do it,” explains Michael Mollett, whose work combines poetry, performance and visual art. “It’s amorphous, it’s almost at times like a death grip. Everything else becomes unimportant but the desire to do whatever it is one does.”

As painter Mark Gash expressed it, making art “is not something you really retire from. You die and that’s when you retire.”

The motivating force driving these artists is nebulous and nearly impossible for them to define.

But it’s a desire that was sufficiently strong to pull Coleman away from Hollywood’s entertainment industry, persuade photographer/video artist Miquel Varon to throw over a career in aerodynamics research, and convince drummer Carl Burnett to gamble his time and money on opening an alternative artists’ space in the Crenshaw District.

“You can’t cut off your arm from your body,” maintained Julien Foreman. “You can’t not be an artist one hour of the day. It’s a 24-hour job, more like a life style.”

The dozens of artists interviewed for this series have adopted a range of survival strategies--working full-time jobs, hustling free-lance work in their fields, obtaining funding from grants, bartering their technical skills to others in exchange for free assistance on their own future projects--to pay the bills and continue their work.

“The kid in you gets to play as long as you can be serious about the day-to-day surviving,” said video artist Michael J. Masucci. “Take care of that and you can basically enact your fantasies.”

Poet Michael C. Ford, who has published a volume of his writings annually for the past 15 years, admitted, “I’m not even writing with any commercial appeal. The woman in the supermarket is not going to say, ‘Let’s see, should I get that Harlequin Romance or this book of poems?’ There’s no contest and I realize that.

“I could become a television formula hack, some motion picture parasite, some video vermin, wear the right designer jeans and get invited to the Playboy mansion but it’s not in the cards for me,” Ford said.

Romantic illusions of living the glamorous artistic life in Los Angeles are foreign to these artists. Like their peers, both the unknowns and those who have broken through to wide recognition and financial success, they are well aware of the dedication and discipline required to buck the tide.

“I didn’t have any options,” Coleman stated flatly. “I was stuck here in L.A. and I didn’t want to be pushed out. I wanted to succeed on my own turf, tough it out no matter how hard that was.

“I made my choice to go for the creative instead of the commercial. I knew what the hardships were going to be so I’m living with my choice.

Curtis Gutierrez is a man who would do anything to pursue his art. The stocky, muscular painter approaches his work with a ferocious dedication that compels him to paint every day, even during the period when he was working on a construction job to support his art “habit.”

“That was the most pinpointed thing I ever had with my work because construction work was so secure,” Gutierrez remarked. “You had money coming in and you were tired and it’s so easy to let go (and take time off from painting). There’s nothing to stop you.

“It’s not tempting but it was almost possible to just say, ‘I can let go.’ Just the possibility that you have to lose something that you really desire and love in life to survive is an incredible reality.”

Gutierrez, 28, had settled on a painting career by the time he was 14. He moved here from the Oakland area in the mid-’70s, and after he was wounded in a shooting incident near USC in 1981 moved into his downtown studio loft, where he lives alone.

He paints with bright industrial pigments, often on unorthodox surfaces like doors and other objects he finds that present an artistic challenge to him.

“A lot of times the object itself tells you what it can do, where it might go,” he declared. “It’s a fine balance between working with that and working with your idea, making them cohesive.

“A real important aspect of what I do is that I was brought up Pentecostal, commonly called Holy Rollers. They speak in tongues and I was brought up real heavy in that kind of intensity.

“It’s definitely one of the artist’s responsibilities to talk about life. Some artists can intellectualize--I want to give you the feeling of it. . . . I like to paint the victory.”

Gutierrez estimates more than 2,000 paintings are stored in his studio and thousands more at his family’s home. His work has been featured in several small gallery exhibitions since 1984, but it was a mural project involving a 25-by-100-foot downtown wall he recently landed that enabled him to quit hustling construction jobs.

“I smelled blood and I’m just going for it tooth and nail,” he said. “I deal with what I get. I’ve learned from a pretty young age how to make weaknesses into strengths, how to make something out of not too much.

“Success for me would be waking up with my wife beside me, getting out of bed and waking the kids, give ‘em back massages and send ‘em off to school. You’ve got to have money to be able to support that and I don’t know if that’s going to be possible for me. It never has been before.”

Photographer Allen Peak fits the maverick mold because his chosen technique isn’t widely accepted within his field. Peak specializes in “manipulative images”--treating several old negatives in the lab and combining them into a fresh image roughly akin to a photographic collage.

“If you compare photography to music, you find that photography is still somewhere in the big band era as far as stage of development,” he declared in the dingy, one-bedroom apartment near MacArthur Park he lived in until a recent move to Arizona. “People are still not willing to go away from the singular image.

“I look on my work as working on creating a language, especially because we’re blitzed by visual images constantly. Normal images become very boring after awhile because anyone can go out with a camera and photograph something.”

The specialized equipment Peak requires for his artistic work is so prohibitively expensive that he works full-time at photo labs to have access to it. But outlets for his creative efforts are limited. Peak’s most recent exhibit involved taping his new series--three sets of four 30-by-48-inch prints that he spent 15 hours a week for six months creating--to the walls of an unleased Sunset Boulevard storefront one weekend afternoon.

“One reason I’m stuck with the issue of being underground is that photography is considered to be hobbyist while painting is still considered a market that sells,” he said.

“There are some alternatives around but it’s hard for me to hustle and work a job. I work with the labs because I’d rather keep the access to the equipment so I can do the work I want to do.”

Wanda Coleman has a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emmy, and three volumes of poetry published by Black Sparrow Press. She has given nearly 200 public readings of her work and was featured on Freeway Records’ trilogy of spoken word albums and the “Twin Sisters” album with rock performer Exene Cervenka of X. But all those accolades and achievements don’t add up to acceptance within the cultural mainstream for Coleman.

“It’s almost as if the cultural surface has hardened and become impenetrable,” she observed. “There’s all this current underneath and it’s really difficult to break through that surface. Words don’t have power here and there’s such an overwhelming glut of verbiage, meaningless print and unoriginality that a lot of things that would be of value to society are lost.”

It was her desire to contribute to the civil rights movement that prompted Coleman to turn to writing as her creative medium in the mid-’60s. She’s written film and TV scripts, plays and prose essays but her preferred literary form is poetry.

“Why poetry?” she mused. “Because of what it does and the fact that art itself is mankind at its best and makes you feel good to be part of the human race.

“The idea that I can interject some sanity and be somewhat of a healer--because the artist in countries outside the Western world is a healer, a shaman-- in my society makes it worth the effort, the sacrifice and whatever else I have to go through to get what I have to say out there.”

Coleman has systematically stripped away extraneous distractions over the years to pursue that goal. She’s been on welfare and worked a variety of jobs to support her family, including five years as a medical transcriber, before the Guggenheim Fellowship freed her to concentrate on her work.

“Writing for me isn’t a glamorous thing,” she maintained. “For years, I’d get up before work at 4 o’clock in the morning and write, work a job and a part-time job and just do it, have the stuff in the mail.

“People think I’m bragging when I say I have over 3,000 rejection slips. It’s not a brag--it’s a badge . I say that to people, especially dominant culture people, because it’s a cakewalk, baby, if you put out a 10th of my energy.

“Are we talking persistence? If I was blonde and blue-eyed, operating on my level, I would have been over years ago.”

As a black woman “street” poet without much formal education past high school, Coleman is an involuntary maverick to the poetry establishment, and one with different goals. Success in her eyes would entail raising social awareness through her writing that would avert real-life tragedies like the 1983 “latch-key killing” (when a policeman responding to a call entered a darkened apartment, reacted to a moving shape and shot and killed a child locked inside the apartment by a working mother who couldn’t afford a baby-sitter).

“Maybe it saves the life of a 6-year-old in Stanton because the neighbor would take her time to find out the real circumstances before she made that call to the police. Maybe a police officer wouldn’t have had his life unnecessarily destroyed because he would have been educated how black people do things in order to survive.

“That’s a big success to me in a town that only measures success in terms of mega-bucks. If I can save the life of a Mexican man who makes a gesture because he doesn’t understand English (and was killed by a policeman in Inglewood), that to me is a success story. All the rest of it is valueless.”

“The thing is, OK, I need a start,” says Dorcea Abdullah over the lunch hour din at a Carl’s Jr. downtown. “I want to bust out. I want to say something to help other people. I want to write and form a group so materially poor people can show us what they know.”

Abdullah can’t match the other artists here in terms of skill or level of achievement, but the all-consuming desire to pursue her dream links her to them. The 30-year-old mother of two has never been published and candidly acknowledges that she needs assistance to realize her hopes of writing stories, songs and plays for children.

Abdullah must overcome some major obstacles--the social isolation of growing up in a strict Black Muslim family in Chicago and the family decision to pull her out of school in fifth grade--to achieve that goal. She works as a teacher’s aide in a Boyle Heights elementary school to supplement her income from the Aid for Dependent Children program, but nothing can sway her determination to write.

“I love knowledge and it could be because I didn’t receive the proper education in school that I thirst for it,” she said. “I’m going to be a writer and if I can support my family through my writing, I’ll do it as long as I live.

“I might get discouraged sometimes but I just have to bounce back. It’s destined, you know. I’m going to do it.”

Carl Burnett’s first major decision was choosing a music career over architectural engineering studies, the second opting to specialize in the creatively rewarding but financially shaky jazz field.

Don’t expect Burnett’s face to pop up on the cover of Money magazine soon. His decision to open Art Works 4, a 50-seat performance space in the Crenshaw District designed to foster artistic experimentation, may be his greatest test of idealistic mettle.

“I got tired of a lot of musicians telling me they couldn’t find anything to do,” explained Burnett at Art Works 4. “I realized that if musicians would get together to create a space and support each other, they would begin to have charge of what they do. It’s like creating employment for yourself.

“You need a trial-and-error situation to develop. It was time for me to take chances and bring artists together so we could begin to find out who we all are.”

It’s the financial risk that makes Art Works 4 the kind of performance space many people contemplate opening but few actually attempt. Burnett, 45, used his own money, knocking down the walls and re-designing the lighting of a long, narrow storefront office. He was often forced to close the doors during Art Works’ early months to accept a weekend gig that would bring in enough money to keep the performance space going.

Burnett also encountered new pressures common to the other mavericks. “It’s changed the way I do things almost 100% because of the time involved,” he admitted. “Normally when I come back from the road, I like to take some time and just cool out in the mountains or hot springs. Now I have to catch up on what’s been happening here while I’ve been gone.”

Burnett’s step-at-a-time philosophy seems to be paying off. The workshops for singers and musicians he organized has given Art Works 4 an in-house supply of performers for the weekend nights there and a pool of dedicated people who can keep the doors open if Burnett takes an out-of-town job.

Burnett plans to introduce poetry and acting workshops soon, but the big challenge is sustaining Art Works 4 in a city that historically hasn’t supported venues with a non-commercial booking policy.

“I would like for people to come by no matter what, without seeing somebody’s name somewhere,” said Burnett. “Take a chance. Go see somebody you don’t know or have never heard of.”

“It started in the spur of the moment when a bomb struck very nearby the cellar in Budapest we were in and my mother, to cover her fear, said in desperation to me, ‘Stand up on this chair and sing!’ ” said Iby Duba, 46, in her Pasadena apartment as she recalled her first public appearance. “It was horrible noise outside, the building was shaking, everybody was holding on to each other and trembling with fear, but I stood up there and sang.

“I finished, got a little applause and the fear went by. I could see the faces from the little kitchen chair and what the faces told became the motive in my life. I had been given a gift--I have a power to take away fear and turn it into joy and I’ve been doing just that over the past 40 years.”

Iby Duba is a maverick even among this collection of mavericks. While the others are all products of American culture, Duba has grappled with the culture shock an artist rooted in the classic European tradition encounters coming to grips with the commercialized art environment in America.

The mezzo-soprano was declared a “national treasure” in her native Hungary but defected after a concert in Vienna in 1967. She immediately won a scholarship for one year at the leading Viennese opera house, the Staatsoper, followed by a two-year performing contract there.

Duba moved to Switzerland to further her career in 1970, married and had a child before emigrating to the United States late in 1973. She focused so much on her responsibilities as a new mother that she turned down a friend’s offer to arrange an audition with the Metropolitan Opera in New York. An extended hospital stay following the birth of her second child in 1977 sparked some serious soul-searching.

“That three months was crucial because I was so desperate and all the questions I formulated were like this: Why the hell I had to learn music, languages, about the soul of the people, about culture, why?” Duba recounted in heavily accented English. “If I am now here to become a mother and only a mother, I can drop my artistic robes and forget about it?

“The answer came from within, that nothing was in vain. I don’t need a theater or an opera house. I can create my own one-woman show and what I have learned back in the old country I can incorporate into what I have learned here and present wherever the opportunity gives itself.”

Duba usually performs that one-woman show in churches or for religious-oriented organizations. She refuses to accept money for her appearances or engage in the hustling to advance her career endemic to the performing arts here. Duba is willing to trust in fate to guide her life and career.

“I always believed that wherever my destiny guided me, it had a purpose,” she said. “I’m not used (by an outside force) to sell my talent; I’m used to share.

“I got it free, it came with the package called Iby Duba and whosoever is interested in Iby Duba’s voice has to listen to what she sings and speaks about. It is aesthetic, artistic, spiritual, intellectual and, yes, it is not a sellable package.

“So why should I aim to get involved and find connections? I am here to give peace with no price tag on it and I do not go to Hollywood. They’re in another business.”

The turning point in Diane Gamboa’s artistic career came in the early ‘70s when the abstract mural she created as part of a Garfield High School art project was whitewashed for not being “Chicana” enough. Gamboa, 28, had been creating small art works throughout her childhood but the confidence-testing mural incident--”I couldn’t understand that all of a sudden I was outcast from making art in my own neighborhood”--triggered a renewed resolve to pursue her vision.

Many people have found her work unduly dark and macabre but, for Gamboa, “to get some kind of reaction--negative or positive--out of one person is fulfilling.” A member of Asco (a community-based group of young Latino street artists) since 1980, Gamboa has designed the group’s stage productions, worked in fashion and sometimes employed non-traditional materials like paper in her work.

“Because I don’t necessarily have the finances to create what I want doesn’t mean that it’s a worse painting or not quite a ‘painting,’ ” Gamboa explained in the downtown studio she shares with photographer/artist Daniel Martinez. “I’m forced to use the medium I have accessible to me and not just stop painting because I don’t have a canvas and some oil paints.”

Like many of the others, Gamboa’s determination to heed the call of freedom of creative expression has guided her career.

“My goal or my drive has never been to make art to make a living. There’re messages I need to say about the struggle of life in an urban environment. It’s very important to document those things in some form because not everybody comprehends or experiences them.

“I do art because it’s the only place where I have real freedom to say and do what I want, to interpret it the way I want with no one saying, ‘Stop!’ ”