The Artists’ Life: Long on Creativity, Short on Cash

The long and tall tan and white bus, 100,000 miles ago bright yellow and the ferry of public school children in Nebraska, pulls up outside Pete’s Breakfast house on Main Street, creating for diners an eclipse of the sky. The entire restaurant staff files out to see it.

Lawrence and Lori Anderson, residents of the bus for four months, have just finished fitting it out and are showing it off. The Andersons are dexterous and inventive, if anything, as both are stone sculptors and oil painters.

This old Harvester may as well be their quarry rock: Seats and floor torn out, the 30-foot-long room now has stuffed armchairs situated on a faux Oriental rug, reading lamps, kitchen cabinets painted cream with bright purple trim, a wall-mounted hand-crank coffee grinder, and a sink fed by a rooftop 40-gallon water tank. To the rear of the bus, where perhaps the last 30 students once bounced along, is a full-size bed draped in a homey patch quilt--all beneath a bookshelf claimed by two kissing stuffed animals. To get to the bed, however, one passes through a plywood cutout whose curvy symmetrical opening is faintly Persian--or a dead-on profile of the Liberty Bell, depending upon your point of view.

It’s home, this bus. After living an apartment-to-apartment itinerancy as Ventura tenants, the Andersons decided that paying rent was bad news. They saw the ad for the bus at Pete’s and picked it up for $1,500.

The couple also decided something else in recent months, something more important than their very dwelling: They’ve had it with art in Ventura.

“Art?” asks Lawrence. “If you’re a welder or a (farmer), Ventura’s a fine place. But it’s too hard here, and I’m 50 and feeling beat from pounding on stone. Lori and I would take our sculpture to Marina Del Rey on weekends--we called those trips our ‘L.A. raids’--and come back with enough money, sometimes two grand, to get by. And even in Ventura, we had a couple $5,000 commissions, but that’s rare. For the most part, it’s a redneck place, and we’re done here.

“We’re out, gone, moving on. And this bus’ll do it.”

*

That was the plan until only recently. Lori, poking around in the engine compartment, got the tip of a finger shorn off by a whirling fan belt. As of this week, skin had grafted over the bone, and talk of a new life elsewhere renewed.

Would it be San Francisco? Lawrence lived there for 10 years in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Santa Fe? Lawrence lived there for 21 years as a contractor and then stone sculptor before meeting Lori, a Massachusetts emigre who served coffee at the local news shop. Boston? Lori’s old stomping grounds, if an Air Force brat can ever call a place home.

It may, in the end, be someplace altogether new. But then it doesn’t seem to matter a great deal to these full-time artists on wheels.

“We’ll just go,” says Lawrence. “Once you start moving, the destination finds you.”

If that sounds slightly platitudinous, consider that it estimates the way Lawrence and Lori carve stone: by following natural contour and revealing shapes that are inherently within the stone’s formation. As a result, the Andersons’ stonework is organically figurative, Lawrence’s given to a larger bolder scale and Lori’s of a more intricate, inward nature.

But now that they are without an apartment and have given up their studio space at Art City II, near the mouth of the Ventura River, Lawrence and Lori paint. On board. “Acid Rain,” a roiling depiction of Los Angeles beneath lurid, outsized, blood-red droplets, hangs at the entrance to the bus, not far from the vintage school bus sticker that demands behavior fit for “the classroom.”

When the Andersons do leave town, they will tow their ’69 VW bus behind. That bus is their current warehouse, art-show-on-wheels and, frankly, next meal in the main bus.

“We are simply moved by the art spirit,” says Lawrence. “That means being full-time artists doing the art. Selling it. And eating hot dogs and beans from the money.”

What it also means is no health insurance--Lori’s finger got fixed, to the extent a bone-clipping is fixing, at the county hospital from a fund for indigents. And no particular security about where the next surge--or trickle--of cash will come from.

Indeed, the $500 that was saved for the departure before Lori’s accident is now spent, and, says Lawrence, “the only thing holding us back this very moment is having no cash.”

*

If the last four years in Ventura are any indication, cashlessness won’t last too long. Even before they paired up in making and selling art, Lori and Lawrence were given to the extreme act.

Lori, in overcoming the caution and phobias “bred into all women,” spent weeks kayaking along the rugged, temperamental Maine ocean coast “just to be alone for a while.” And Lawrence, having fallen in love with Lori on sight in Santa Fe, pursued her to Boston after she left town abruptly. Granted, it did take him six weeks to get to her, but his method was emblematic of his ardor and smiling monomania: Carless with $37 to his name at age 44, he hopped on a bicycle and pedaled the 2,000 miles--in a Speedo and sneakers.

That was six years ago.

Today’s is a departure of another kind, at once a restored American impulse to take to the open road and start life again, and an adaptation to the current realities of a cash-slow economy and spotty art market.

Lori, a former high school English teacher, is most eloquent on the subject.

“I think, in a sense, we are missionaries,” she says. “We’re missionaries serving two purposes. People see the bus and see freedom and hope. And the art world today is a conspiracy of high prices, keeping real art out of the hands of too many people. Our prices have always been below market. So we’re fighting the whole art conspiracy.”

Freedom’s patriots, art’s guerrillas. That’s more than enough to take them to the next stop, the next meal, the next life.