On sunny days, I spend a lot of my lunch hours out in the South Park Blocks. The South Park Blocks will always be special to me because of the years I spent at PNCA, which at the time was housed within the walls of the Portland Art Museum. Those tree-lined blocks hold a lot of memories of a time when my life was dedicated solely to the purpose of drawing and painting. My life is a little different now.
Yesterday was one of those perfect Portland summer days, not a cloud in the sky and in the upper 70s. I headed out into the South Park Blocks for my afternoon ritual of park bench sitting and daydreaming, a ritual that is shared by quite a cross-section of the local population. Grey-hairs, street kids, office workers, tourists, homeless, and students on summer break – the sun brings them out in droves. But yesterday? Our daydreams had musical accompaniment.
I’ve seen this guy and his xylophone before, but unfortunately I’ve been too rushed to really stop and take more than a brief listen. How sad is that, really? That I didn’t have time to appreciate an impromptu musical performance staged in the very park that I used to sketch in? And I have no memory of what was so important at the time that it kept me from enjoying the moment. My former self would have stopped.
But yesterday I had my entire lunch break ahead of me, no rushes or worries. I took my spot on a nearby bench and fully indulged all of my senses. Xylophone music is so soothing and hypnotic and there is this certain way that music sounds when heard through sunlight. I watched as others stopped and listened for a while. I watched those tall trees sway as the breeze moved through them. I studied the kaleidoscope of patterns created by the shadows and sunbeams. I felt a moment of pure joy in a day mostly filled with office tasks.
There has been a lot of worrisome cyber-ink lately dedicated to the survival of the arts in Portland, especially over on the Portland Arts Watch blog. Economic times are tough and artists are hardly immune from the impact. Some would argue that in hard financial times, art is expendable. I both agree and disagree with that sentiment.
But I also know a secret. As tough as the economic times are, artists are tougher. Making art is, in many ways, taking nothing and turning it into something. All you really need to create a masterpiece is a pencil and some paper. Did you know that Toulouse Lautrec made hundreds of paintings on cardboard? He was hardly deterred by not having the money for finely stretched canvases and his cardboard paintings now hang in the world’s finest museums. Those artists who are driven to express themselves will always find a way to do it. Like the guy and his xylophone.
This notion was reinforced again for me today when I saw this simple child’s drawing sketched into the bricks in front of the Portland Art Museum.
It’s actually kind of a brilliant idea. If you want to get your work noticed but don’t have a significant portfolio – make some drawings on the sidewalk just outside of the city’s largest visual arts institution. Fantastic! I only wish I had thought of it first.
Artists are highly adaptable and can turn almost any environment into their canvass or stage. Chalk + sidewalk = art gallery. Park + xylophone = concert hall. The equation can be really that simple. The arts in Portland will survive. Our job is to take the time to notice and appreciate the art around us, and ideally open our wallets when we can.
I only had a dollar on me to throw into xylophone guy’s hat, but I can give him a little free publicity here to make up for it. I Googled him. Turns out, his name is Michael Charles Smith and what I’ve been calling a xylophone is actually a marimba. Check him out.
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Glad to know the name of the marimba guy — never got around to going over and asking him. Did get to explain to a couple of people at the nearby Starbucks (where I was sitting outside) that it was a marimba. He’s been out in the Park several days — the music just seems to fit the summer breeze.
There was a person with a piano who wheeled it out into the Park on several weekends. And on other days we have the bagpipe-playing unicyclist. Part of the fun of Portland is that you never know where you’ll find artists.
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