Too Much Festival

By any account, it was much too much.

Sixteen days of art, dance, music and story from around the world. Simply the names in print made a kind of poetry that could expand one’s cultural viewpoint: Woomera Mornington, Conjunto Jarocho Papaloapan, Zenshuji Zendeko, Na Pua Me Kealoha and Kulintang.

They played gamelans, zithers, bamboo flutes, harps and virtuoso gongs. They did the dances of Australian aborigines and played tunes of ancient China and modern Brazil.

For all that, I am sorry to say, my lasting impression of the Los Angeles Festival is a feeling of guilt for not having suspended all other duties in life during those three weeks to rush back and forth across the city catching every one of those distant folk strains.

Judging by news reports of poor attendance, the festival must have been as ill-timed for most of the city’s fast-paced, overcommitted, worn-out working people as it was for me.

My own participation in the festival turned out to be extremely parochial, but nonetheless rewarding. I decided to look in on some northeast Los Angeles artists, hoping to learn of the folk strains of home.

The idea came from the Arroyo Arts Collective, an organization promoting the idea that the northeast communities have an inherent attraction to artists. To illustrate the point, which has raised some skepticism, the Collective arranged a self-guided tour of the homes and studios of 29 artists.

I made it only to three, hardly a comprehensive survey, but still an afternoon’s work.

First was Susan Moss, a graduate of Otis, who has filled her large, skylighted York Boulevard studio--once probably an auto repair shop--with large, brightly abstract canvases.

With promotional skills to match her artistic talent, Moss outlined the prestigious shows her paintings have been in and the prices they command, going well into four figures. She talked expectantly of moving up to Malibu someday.

Not far up the street, a more truly indigenous artist named Gene Armstrong has filled a cottage near Avenue 56 with the images that keep her well. There’s a voyeur’s satisfaction in the intimate scenes she has caught in public--two girls showering at the beach, an old woman sitting in a chair in a moving van, a woman leaning on her escort at an art gallery. Armstrong’s naive style makes a quick psychological connection.

She said she taught 17 years in an elementary school before going crazy--literally. Not long after leaving the hospital, she did a portrait of her husband as van Gogh’s peasant in a straw hat.

“I had so much fun doing that that pretty soon I started painting in the evenings while I was watching TV,” she said.

In six months she had a show in Pasadena. This summer, she had four shows. She’s even sold a few paintings. She needs the money, because her teacher’s retirement fund is running dry.

Armstrong has begun to study drawing, though it’s not her natural form of expression.

“I think there’s much more to painting than just drawing,” she said. “I think it comes from inside first.”

Forty years of drawings were on display in Jesus Perez’s comfortable stucco on Shasta Circle near Glendale. Since sketching a perfectly literal Humphrey Bogart in the mid-1950s, when he was a teen-ager living in Atwater, Perez has turned his fertile mind on everything the world put before him. In a matter of days, he’ll sketch a hundred pages of human eyes, forks and spoons, electrical parts, disembodied thoughts, old people in hospital beds.

“I’m more interested in painting what I experience and feel than what it looks like,” Perez said. If the viewer doesn’t get it right away, he’s happy to give clues.

A huge oil montage of dark and tumultuous images that hung in his living room came, he said, from his grandmother’s recollections as a Revolucionaria in Pancho Villa’s army. She would grab the tail of his grandfather’s horse to get through patches of mud.

“She’d see the horse’s butt and the big sombrero, and she was so proud of him. She said, ‘As long as I could hold onto that, I knew everything would be OK.’ ”

Through most of his life, Perez supported his family on the salary of a commercial graphic designer. At last, he feels ready to forsake a job for the life of a professional fine artist.

Though he has created tens of thousands of images, Perez had never shown before Sunday, he said.

Once, a gallery suggested he try to project a consistent style.

He couldn’t comply, since each painting derived its style from its subject.

Now, for his coming out, Perez is answering the challenge by painting one subject in dozens of styles.

He focused on the waitress, whose work struck him as the vestige of nurturing in public life.

He’s completed about 30 waitresses. Some are nude, some are in armor, some in the robes of gods. But each is handing out a plate and has three on the other arm.

I don’t know art, but I know an artist when I see one. Highland Park has at least a couple.

Perhaps next year the L.A. Festival will be held on a weekday with a citywide holiday declared so that everyone will have a chance to spend a day inside an artist’s life.