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There are the rare athletes who come around perhaps once in a lifetime, like Bill Russell, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky and Jack Nicklaus. And then there are the rarer athletes who only come around maybe once each century, like swimming’s Mark Spitz and speed skating’s Eric Heiden, and soccer’s Pelé.
There are the rare composers who come around maybe only once in a lifetime. Then there are the rarer composers who are lucky to surface perhaps once each century, like Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. But of these musical geniuses none came close to the genius of Chet Atkins who was born at the right Time and Place to propel popular music to the peak of Atman’s Big Bang, in music.
There are the musicians who come around maybe once in a lifetime, like a violinist that can play a difficult violin concerto flawlessly. Then there are the rarer musicians who come around maybe once each century. Like a violinist that can play a difficult violin concerto so flawlessly and effortlessly that it becomes a game.
Niccolò Paganini could play the violin with a magic that turned playing the violin into a game. The story goes that sometimes Paganini would deliberately break one or more of his violin's four strings while he was playing and then, like a game, appear to do the impossible as he kept on playing the music like nothing happened – music that normally would need all four strings.
Paganini played his violin with such a rare “magic” that legends gave him both a genetic deformity of the hands and also a diabolical power that enabled him to play his violin like it was a game.
While there are athletes, composers and musicians that are so rare that they come around perhaps once each century there is the very rare artist that is lucky to come around once every several hundred years. And this does not necessarily include Leonardo da Vinci.
When it comes to the visual images, art, we have a habit of mixing two separate skills of an artist and lumping them into one. Artistic creativity is one. And then the technical skills an artist needs to bring his image to life, the skill of painting, “the hands,” is the other.
There are those rare artists that are so creative with their compositions that they only come around perhaps once in a lifetime. Then there are those rare artists that are so skilled with their hands that they make painting look easy, like as a game. They might come around once each century.
But the artist that has both the rare creativity of a Mozart or Beethoven and the technical skills, like Paganini had to play his violin, such a very-rare artist is only likely to come around every few hundred years. Such a very-rare artist would be as rare as an athlete who can win a gold medal in the decathlon and then become the chess champion of the world.
And even if there are more than one of these very-rare artists alive at one time then destiny can only serve one. Because only one of these very-rare artists can be born at the right time and the right place to end up being motivated and inspired by the greatest artists that only destiny can bring together for the greatest age of artistic creativity the world has seen.
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In the mid 1950’s Norman Adams left Walla Walla to study art at the University of Washington. At the time the Art Department at the UW were so intoxicated with their Canine Wisdom that any painting that came even close to the reality of “fresh air, flowers and trees,” made them bark and growl with angry words like “non-art.” Their Canine Wisdom that could leave experts no doubt that the more real the art the less it could be real-art, Modern Art.
And so the Art Department at the University of Washington sold their Canine Wisdom to their students because it explained in detail why pictures of soup-cans and urinals hung on museum walls was “real-art,” Modern Art, which Canine Wisdom makes Pavlov’s Art.
Norman had no problems with the soup-cans and urinals of Modern Art, which he always liked, Modern Art. But he wanted to learn to paint realistically first. Norman was like a pig-headed medical student who simply knows that he has to learn anatomy if he is going to be a surgeon -- regardless of what the experts might say. Similarly, Norman knew that if he did not learn to paint realistically then he would have to live and probably die with the UW’s Modern Art.
Norman knew something that Salvador Dali took for granted. Salvador Dali could never have given the world his Surrealism had he not learned to paint realistically.
Norman was unhappy at the UW until one of his advisers took him aside and pointed him towards Los Angeles. This adviser assured Norman that the Los Angeles Art Center School did not try to “sell” the Canine Wisdom of Modern Art at the expense of everything else, like “fresh-air, flowers and trees.”
After studying in LA destiny led Norman to the Mecca for illustrations, New York. It led him to the Charles E. Cooper Studio, CEC. When the publishing industry was at its height in the mid-1900s the Charles E. Cooper Studio was a Global Empire of artistic creativity which simply had no rival, anywhere. The Cooper Studio was a global dynasty of artistic creativity like the NY Yankees were a baseball dynasty when they had competition but no rivals.
This same destiny brought together the greatest artists that history would ever see in one place, the Cooper Studio. These artists supplied the booming publishing industry with visual images, art, illustrations that would captivate the “Public” to sell books, paperbacks, products … magazines. And no other art agency did this as successfully as Cooper Studio.
The Cooper Studio supplied the publishing industry with illustrations before there were advertising agencies. So it performed two functions. It primarily provided the publishing industry with editorial images. Charles E. Cooper did not charge any of his illustrators commission for editorial illustrations. Needless to say most of the illustrators that worked for him did their best to get editorial jobs so that they would not have to pay Charles E. Cooper his commission. The second function of CEC was to provide any industry with images that would sell products, books, stories, magazines. The Cooper artists did such a good job selling products with their images that his studio functioned as the first advertising agency.
The explosion of artist creativity that gave birth to Atman’s Big Bang was all about the publishing industry.
When the publishing industry was able to bring the cost of books and magazines down so that the common-man, “Public,” could read them, especially in color, it triggered, “Unmasked,” this explosion of artistic creativity the world has never seen.
The most interesting thing about this biggest-explosion of artistic creativity is that it is lost to history. And if History has to repeat itself then we will not read about this unfathomable explosion of artistic creativity for another three to four hundred years. Because that is how long it took history to discover the word “Renaissance” it needed to get the Dark Ages of Christianity somehow into the Reformation.
This explosion of artistic creativity gave us, amongst everything else, Modern Art and all its movements. There is little in Rock and Roll that did not originate with from Gospel music, Jazz or Rhythm and Blues of the Negro’s Soul. Similarly there is nothing in Modern Art that did not somehow originate from the published images that came from the creative imagination of an illustrator... who most took what artists like Gustav Klimt gave them to new levels of Creativity.
Before movie stars and athletes became rich and famous, illustrators were the wealthy celebrities. They were the Leonardo da Vincis and Michelangelos of modern times. They had agents before athletes and movie stars knew what an agent was. The successful ones lived like kings with chauffeurs and even planes and pilots. Fans mobbed them for autographs. Some, like Arthur William Brown, even had groupies.
And New York was the hub for the world. Publishing companies from all over the world came to New York to get what they could get nowhere else: the creativity of the most gifted artists that the world has ever seen concentrated in one place.
By the late 1960’s technology was starting to erode the popularity of magazines and illustrators were paying the price. The advances of technology forced many illustrators to find new agents, called art galleries. According to Canine Wisdom of Pavlov’s Art these art galleries somehow turned illustrators into artists so that the words of History could then later dissolve the difference.
Norman Adams was one of the few artists who was creative enough and skilled enough to adapt to the ever-changing styles and fads of the Public to make a solid living as an illustrator for a few more decades in the slowly dying illustration business.
Those illustrators who could adapt to the movements, trends, fads, and sometimes gimmicks these galleries had at the time became successful. But it came at a price. Most of these illustrators turned artists had to develop a unique style or signature to their paintings to become successful selling through galleries. But this also locked their creativity to that style, niche, trend, like Western Art or Wildlife Art, or whatever. These illustrators turned artists were thus forced to be creative within a small niche, like a violinist is stuck when he can only play gypsy music and nothing else.
Norman had no such limitations. While he was doing illustrations for the publishing industry Norman simply did not have the time to paint enough paintings that would allow galleries to promote him. Because of this Norman was not locked into a niche, style or trend. He painted whatever he wanted in any style he wanted. He was like a musician that could play any type of music so that destiny could make the most of it.
And the addiction, of Heaven-inside, that drove Norman to paint prevented him from painting enough originals for galleries even if he did nothing else.
When it came to his “work,” doing illustrations, he might have to swallow the Canine Wisdom that would-be editors called “art directors” were conditioned to wallow in. But he refused to swallow the words gallery owners use to control, and sometimes exploit, their artists.
When it came to his addiction to paint, Heaven-inside, Norman could no more follow someone's advice for painting than Beethoven could for composing music... any more than Van Gogh would listen to words about his hopeless inability to paint.
Creativity
Back in the mid 1980’s I thought I knew Norman Adams well, but I didn't. And then the forces that brought us together separated us until March 2006.
Norman did not talk much about the gifts he has, which he takes for granted. As if everyone else also has them. But he did talk about generalities that would over the years keep bringing me back to these gifts he has. Gifts that he takes for granted even thought few can fathom them mostly because nobody else has them.
Back in the 1980’s he told me that each child is born with an artistic creativity that family and society then usually beats out of the child. This can happen very simply, for example, when the child is admonished for creatively picking up a pencil with his left hand and not the “right.” Or when we try to put the word called beauty that is stuck in our eye, ego - I, into the child's eye.
Norman must have been born with this creativity because at the age of around five he proudly painted the family car, all of it. His father became his first critic.
Whatever his father said and did must have motivated the young Norman because he never stopped painting regardless of success or failure, and regardless of what anyone said or did. And he would not need critics because he would always be just like his father -- his worst critic.
Back in the mid 1980s Norman talked a lot about the beauty that is always in front of us. All I had to do is to take the beauty out of my proverbial eye, the ego - I, and it was always there, in nature. He made me see all sorts of wonderful things that are so obvious to him because they are always there. But so few ever see, mostly because Canine Wisdom keeps this word beauty embedded in our eyes.
And he would talk about the different variables in his paintings like strengths and weaknesses. And he would talk about the strengths and weaknesses of other paintings and their artists.
All artists have their strengths and weaknesses. Some are good at designing, creating, and others might have good technical skills. It is a rare artist that is strong in both. (And it is an even rarer artist who is strong in both, designing and painting, who does not have an ego that sooner or later kills one or the other and sometimes both.)
It would take me nearly two decades to understand the three separate skills he was talking about in generalities.
The Ingredients of Creativity.
The three skills an artist needs before the painting even begins.
1: Discrimination, the ability to tell the difference between variables of sight, art, and sound, music. Same as taste, touch and smell.
2: Identify the way these variables influence each other.
3: To be creative with these variables. To have the ability to organize or orchestrate the variables artistically.
Then there are the technical skills: the “hands” the artist needs to bring an image to life, painting.
And then there are the very rare hands that turn painting into a game.
One: Discrimination, the ability to tell the difference.
If we take ten different recordings of the same piano concerto by ten different soloists then most of us could tell that one recording is different from the others, even though the music is the same. If we listen to classical music long enough then some of us will be able to identify the soloist … and a few will be able to identify the orchestra. But it would be a rare person who could detect that even though the soloist and orchestra is the same the conductor is not. Mozart more than likely had this ability, but he had no recordings, radio or LP records.
When Norman was working in the “office,” studio, back in New York with the other illustrators, they would often listen to classical music. They got so good at listening to music that most of the illustrators could identify the soloist and then the orchestra. And some could even identify the conductor, even though they had never heard the recording before. After a while this turned into a game where these illustrators would bring LP records to work just to test each other's ability to identify the soloist, orchestra and then its conductor.
When it came to music Norman was one of the few who could go beyond the musicians and listen to a piece of music and often identify not only the era that the music was composed, and its nationality (like German versus Russian) but the composer, even though he had never heard the composition before.
It was this rare gift that Norman had to discriminate between musicians, orchestras, conductors and composers that years later made me think of Mozart. Mozart was famous for doing the same thing with music. Years later it dawned on me that Norman was simply doing the same things with visual images, art, as he could do with music, what Mozart did with music.
As with sound, music, so too with visual images. If we take an image and have ten artists paint it most of us could find differences between each painting. But it would be a rare person who could associate the painting with the painter… and even fewer could order them from the best to the worst … what visually works the best and what doesn’t. Or, which image of the ten would appeal the best to an audience. There are no limits to this discrimination. In music, for example, rare people can even tell who made a violin from its sound.
If a wolf can tell from the markings of a pack that the pack leader is not much of leader any more then there is no reason a person cannot look at a painting and tell which wife or boyfriend was loving or nagging the artist.. or what drugs the artist was on... or what kind of withdrawal... or what kind of music the artist was listening to when he was painting.
Everything that happens to us influences everything we do, somehow. So too with artists and their art, be it music or painting. Everything that happens to them has to influence what and how they paint to some degree. It has to be all in the painting. It just takes a rare person who comes around perhaps once every hundred years who can detect these variables inside a painting, music or anything else we do and say.
Illustrators have to develop these skills to know what will make an image work visually for the common-man, Public. This ability to tell the difference is essential if an illustrator is going to stay ahead of the competition. Norman developed these skills to the point where he could often spot images and identify the artist that designed the image, and then tell if a different person painted the image. And he often could also spot if one artist painted a portion of a painting and another did the rest. This is simply a skill each illustrator has to develop and keep perfecting or the competition will. Norman kept improving these skills so the best the competition could ever do was to keep up with him.
To Norman every painting is like a fingerprint of the artist, a fingerprint that is the same and yet it changes with variables like creativity and age. It is exactly like a face. From birth to death the face is the same and yet it changes. It is like handwriting that all sorts of variables like age, stress, drugs, wives and lovers and... music alter and yet it is the same handwriting. So too in everything we do, like speaking and its dialects, and then the voice. A flu can change a voice and yet it is the same voice. And the words we use, and the way we use them. Each one of us uses words differently from everyone else. So too with composing and playing music, writing and painting.
On several occasions Norm and I went into bookstores and Norman would see paperbacks at a distance and then tell me the names of the illustrators who painted the images on them. Some of these images he had never seen before. He rarely missed.
We would go to art shows and he would sometimes spot an image and tell me where the artist stole it from. He did this even though the artist tried to disguise the stolen image by reversing it, or tilted it, or changed its size. (I would get photos so that later I could compare the images to the “originals” -- Norman never missed.) For him these detective skills that he had worked like a game.
He told me that often it was easy for him to spot plagiarized images because they did not match or fit the fingerprint, the style and/or the design, of the rest of the painting. For him these stolen images stood out like a bull does in a herd of cows.
We went to enough wildlife art shows together … I could not believe the number of artists who, for example, simply traced or copied one of his drawings in “Drawing Animals.” Artists also seemed to have a special penchant for copying the animal and fish illustrations Norman and others did for magazines, like Field and Stream
When it came to spotting plagiarized images Norman was a proverbial bloodhound. Short of spreading pepper on his trail there is very little an escaped convict can do to change his smell to lose a bloodhound. So too with Norman. If an artist traced or stole someone else’s image, that Norman had seen, then there was little the artist could do to the image to hide it from Norman.
Two: Identify the ways variables interact.
It is one skill to tell the difference and it is an additional skill to separate out what ingredient or component makes the difference. It is one skill for a person to tell the difference between one perfume and another but it is an additional skill to identify the ingredients that make one perfume more pleasant or luring than another. It is one skill to tell that an image is stolen, and it is another to figure out what made it obvious. Was it the image itself, or the design that did not fit the style or design of the rest of the painting ... or ... that tipped the observer that the image was stolen?
Most people can taste the difference between a Coke and a Pepsi. Most people can taste the difference between one goulash and another. But few people can identify the ingredients that makes one goulash different from another. Norman could do this with artwork. He could look at an image and break it down into its ingredients or fundamentals.
In music, it is one thing to tell the difference between one orchestra and another, but it is a separate or additional skill -- that most conductors have -- to identify the specific instrument(s) that make one orchestra better or different from another. Similarly with a painting. If an image “works,” for example, then Norman can identify the ingredients that make it work and the ingredients that messed it up to make it, as he says, “awful.” This is nothing new or impossible because Mozart was famous for doing this with music.
Paganini could do it with music. He could pick up differences in the way music was played that most of us cannot image. For example, when music speeds up a few missed notes might go undetected by the average listener. But to a Paganini missed notes must sound like chalk screeching on a blackboard. If Paganini could not hear that a few notes are off then he could never have developed the skills that made the difference between a few missed notes and the perfection he was known for.
Three: The ability to orchestrate the variables artistically.
There are those who can identify the ingredients that make a perfume luring. But it is another to know what ingredients a perfume needs to be even more luring.
Mozart could do it with music. He could take music composed by a mere genius and sometimes with a few minor changes improve it. Norman can do the same with images.
Mozart could have taken a series of works of a composer and arrange them in the order they were composed .. and then point out which was the peak of creativity, if any. Norman Adams can do the same with art. It may sound impossible but it isn’t. On a rudimentary level every music student learns to do it when he studies Beethoven. To even a marginal student of music it is obvious that Beethoven could not have written his Ninth Symphony before the Eight, let alone his First.
These three abilities or talents define the different skills needed for composing, be it music or art. These skills an artist needs before he even starts to paint.
In music the next skill is usually another person. Because if the first three skills make the composer then the fourth is the musician.
The technical skills: what an artist or musician can do with his “hands.”
There are dozens of coaches out there that know how to win games but few can play the game they coach well enough to win games. Similarly there are hundreds of would-be artists that know what would make a great painting but few can paint it, and even fewer can paint it with a skill that comes along maybe once each century... and far rarer is the creative artist that can paint so effortlessly that painting becomes a game of bringing images to life.
Then there are those artists that have little creativity but they have “hands” that can paint like Paganini could play his violin. Many of these Paganinis of painting -- with little creativity but superb skills – paint photographs. Many also account for most of the estimated >80% forgeries in museums that the best experts cannot detect. And probably never will unless they find someone with the rare detective skills of a Norman Adams.
The Creativity called: “I can do better.”
To the best of my knowledge Norman has never been fully satisfied with anything he has painted. This is because of four words: “I can do better,” ICDB. I am sure he said these words to himself after he painted his father’s car at the age of five. He uses these four words not only for his own paintings but those of anyone else.
These are the same words (the Creativity inside) Beethoven must have said after he completed a symphony as a stepping stone for the next; the exact same words Vincent van Gogh must have said after he finished a painting.
This four words cannot come from an ego. On the contrary. These four words define the Creativity that kills egos. This Creativity that kills egos is so overpowering that literally nothing can touch the addictive “fixes” it gives, “Heaven.” Neither the vicissitudes of life, or success or failure can touch this relentless passion and addiction to create that comes around perhaps once each century.
Either this Creativity kills the ego or the ego kills the creativity – there is no other alternative.
I knew Norman Adams for several weeks before he told me he was an illustrator. When it comes to his work he simply has no ego. So I assumed from this that an illustrator must be like an architect, because, to me back then, artists had to have egos. Then a few months later I was stunned when I walked into his office, studio. The walls and the windows were all covered with large pieces of brown wrapping paper with large cartoons of images that were variations of the same theme.
“What exactly does an illustrator do?”
He told me that he had an agent in NY who finds jobs for him to do, illustrations. And he showed me a painting on the easel that he was doing for Reader's Digest.
What about the cartoons on the walls?
He told me that when he wants to do a painting (for himself – for his addiction to create) he does these full-size cartoons with different designs and then he tapes them on the walls and windows, and then he takes his time to decide which one will work the best. Sometime the designs simply don't work for him so he replaces them with others that he then keeps looking at until he finds the one that works. Sometimes the design of a painting falls together quickly but it can also take months, even years before a design falls together for him.
I would find out later that once a design falls together for him then there is literally nothing on earth that will stop him from painting it .. no matter how meaningless and stupid the painting might be to everyone else.
And although often it takes take time and effort and trouble to design a painting, the painting itself is always effortless for Norman, like a game.
He paints in layers. Each layer adds depth and detail to the last, as each layer brings the images alive more and more. The more layers the more life the images get with effortless ease, like a game. It is a game that allows him to paint in any type or style of painting as well as if not better than any artist. If he adds few layers his style is impressionistic. He can then add layers to make it realistic or surrealistic or anything else he imagines. And while most artists have to toil and slave to bring a painting to life for him it is like an effortless game, like the games Paganini played with his violin.
And while he is effortlessly adding layers to a painting to bring it to life it gives him time to think of the next fixes... the next paintings that will always work better ... just like Beethoven was obsessively thinking one or more symphonies ahead of the symphony he was obsessively composing.
The addiction to manipulate cartoons on the wall is like the one Beethoven must have had to keep rewriting his music until it worked.
Once the design of an image worked Norman had to paint with an obsession only van Gogh must have known, an obsession to paint regardless of how meaningless the subject might be to the world, like a coatimundi or stray donkeys in Mexico. So much so that if another design works even better then he will paint a second painting of two donkeys and the same rooster in Mexico to get the next fix this addiction to create gives him regardless of the fact that it might never sell.
And when it comes to his paintings it is not just art but a Joy that soothes the eyes to warm the heart, “Heaven.”
This Joy cannot be put into words but it is the same Joy we get from listening to Beethoven's, Bach's and Mozart's music, or to a good rock concert... or opera, or even a sports event that animates the Public with this same “Heaven-inside” that the performers have and unmask in the audience, inside each one of us, the Public.
There are all sorts of artists who are both creative and also skillful with their hands, but it is a very rare artist whose creativity and rare skills are combined with an addiction to create, like with van Gogh. An addiction to create that nothing Outside, be they rewards or failures, or the pressures and stress of life, can abate.
And if there is more than one of these very rare artists with creative mind and magic hands then destiny can only serve one to be born at the right time to end up working with… to be motivated by the greatest illustrators and artists of the greatest artistic age that destiny brought together, for a short time, for him to blossom.
There might be all sorts of geniuses who are creative and talented like Leonardo De Vinci but only one was born at the right time in the right place under the right circumstances.
So too with Norman Adams.
If Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were the “epic icons” of the Italian Renaissance then twelve Famous Artists give us the message they lived, Heaven’s Message, out of History’s black-hole, their graves: There are two artists, more than any other, who stand out with their technical-skills, artistic-creativity and phenomenal-versatility to be the Epic Icons for Atman’s Big Bang. John Atherton's life was cut short by a heart attack while doing what he loved as much as he liked painting and music, fishing. The other Epic Icon is Norman Adams.
And of these two, only Norman Adams was born at the right Time and Place to do what nobody has ever done before in art, or music or sports.
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-- Geza Palotas
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