For the next couple weeks on the radio show, we’ll be taking a peek at Studio 360’s new book, Spark: How Creativity Works. It draws on ten years (!) of interviews with America’s most accomplished filmmakers, musicians, art, and others about what it takes to live a creative life.
This week, Kurt talks with Julie Burstein, the show’s former executive producer, about a subject that’s meat and potatoes in the interview biz: childhood. We hear about Chuck Close painting from a nude model at age eight, “which made me the envy of everyone in my neighborhood” and helped him get past a severe learning disability. Richard Ford tells us that his childhood memories are cans stored in his mental “pantry,” waiting till he has the right recipe. One such memory, Ford explains, was an untimely end of the family cat under the family station wagon — which found its way into one of Ford’s celebrated Frank Bascombe novels.
You can hear Kurt’s full, original conversations with the artists below.
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Chuck Close, painter
(Originally broadcast January 19, 2002)
For over 30 years, Chuck Close has been making huge, meticulous paintings of faces — 9 foot, looming images of himself, and of friends such as the composer Philip Glass and the late painter Robert Rauschenberg. He is one of today’s most famous and seriously regarded portraitists — particularly impressive since Close suffers from prosopagnosia, face blindness. Kurt visits Close at his New York studio.
Richard Ford, novelist
(Originally broadcast November 10, 2006)
He’s not the type of novelist who cranks out a new book every year. Ideas marinate in Richard Ford’s mind for years – sometimes fifty years – before they surface in his stories. Ford spent so much time gathering material and reworking the manuscript of his latest novel, The Lay of the Land (2006), he kept the pages in his freezer for safekeeping. Ford talks with Kurt about the challenges of aging a character in real time.
Mira Nair, filmmaker
(Originally broadcast March 16, 2007)
Mira Nair’s films take place all over the Indian diaspora – from the rough city streets of Salaam Bombay! (1988) to the American Deep South in Mississippi Masala (1991). The Namesake (2006) spanned the distance from Calcutta to New York: a young Indian couple who makes a life together in the US, and the struggles of their American-born son. Nair tells Kurt why unconventional love stories have inspired so many of her films. And how an encounter with a band of street performers set her on the path to becoming a filmmaker.
Richard Serra, sculptor
(Originally broadcast May 25, 2007)
Richard Serra began working with steel as a teenager, on a summer job in a steel mill. He went on to become one of America’s greatest sculptors. Serra’s recent pieces are massive, 12-foot-tall steel walls that curve and lean together to form fascinating spaces you can enter and walk around. Serra walks Kurt through a major retrospective of his work at New York’s MoMA as he finishes up its installation.
You asked listeners for a defining moment from childhood:
I was the third daughter in a family that treasured sons. Just after the birth of my first brother, I was around 4 yrs old, my father was detailed to take me to nursery school . He let me out of the car. He said Goodbye and went on to work. I went to the building and down the steps. The door was locked and there were no lights on. No one was in the building. I did not know what to do. So, I sat down to think. My father had dropped me off and said goodbye. He did not mention seeing me later or anything. It was very unusual for him to take me anywhere. So, maybe he had decided to give me away. I knew I was miles from my parents’ house.I was all the way across town. So, maybe the point was that I should go away. After all, a new baby had been born and it had been a boy. They no longer needed three girls. I don’t know how long I wandered around the neighborhood. I do know that I was hungry and peed in my pants because I had no where to go.
The next recollection I have is being in a police car, being very proud that I knew my name and home address. But, when the police drove me up to the house, my Mother came storming out, the new baby in her arms and she was mad. She jerked me out of the car and practically threw me into the house. I knew I had made a huge mistake being brought back. No one talked to me for the longest time that day. I was in my room, alone for most of it. My oldest sister came home from school and raced upstairs to find out about me. Her refrain that day was: why didn’t you stay lost. You shouldn’t have come back.
For the next 50+ years I lived on the assumption that I wasn’t wanted in my family of origin, that I had no place. After all, no one said they were sorry I had been lost or had wandered around a strange part of town for hours. In fact, no one ever talked to me about it- ever. I did try to review the incident in therapy, but it is one of those painful, defining moments that don’t always get completely worked through.
My kids each know they are/ were wanted, treasured and cherished. It was all i could do to make sure the sense of loneliness and uselessness was not passed on to another generation. That I did have control over.