Ronnie Wells — Not Your Typical Front Man

Courtesy of Ronnie Wells

On the surface, Ronnie Wells’ story seems typical. Born and raised in Jersey City, New Jersey, Wells became interested in music while he was still in high school. After playing drums in his high school band and the local junior drum corps, soon a friend was asking him if he would step in front of the kit. 

As Wells recalled in a recent one-on-one interview, “I stopped playing drums and started fronting the group, singing only. And it went from there, I had a couple of groups in the meantime and picked up other instruments such as keyboards and bass.”

Like many musicians, Wells started to juggle multiple groups and studio work. “New York City was very close to North Jersey, where we were. It’s just over the bridge. So I was able to get a lot of work over in New York, as well as in New Jersey, in studios and clubs.”

Sparky Campanella’s horizon Series

Photo courtesy of Sparky Campanella

What is it about staring at a horizon that is so calming? Watching the sunset over an ocean. Being mesmerized by the road disappearing straight ahead on a highway. Lying on the grass taking in the blue sky and puffy clouds. Photographer Sparky Campanella set out to explore the relationship between land and sky, man and nature, in his series appropriately called horizon. And through his work he has achieved an unexpected level of tranquil beauty in everyday scenes.

In a recent interview Sparky told us the images “have a calmness to them. They’re quiet and they’re powerful. I like that combination. I was trying to have the biggest impact with minimal and often abstract content. It’s calming. It’s contemplative, but there’s still energy there.”

He began the series one day on the top of a friend’s studio. The roofline of the white stucco building against the cloudy sky caught his attention. He recalled, “I saw this scene that just struck me. It just grabbed me. That’s true of a lot of the horizon work. A lot of times I go out looking for things, driving around, walking around, at a slower pace and just observing. And some things just click.”

This minimalism is something Sparky tries to achieve in all his work. He explained, “I aspire to have minimal content and maximum impact — both conceptual impact and visual impact. I try to make pictures that are beautiful because I want to make stuff that I would want on my own wall. And yet they are not just ornamental but they have layers of conceptual depth to them.”

He went on, “The conceptual side is focused around the relationship between man and nature.” He talks more about this notion on his website saying, “I believe that man and nature can co-exist. horizon manifests my belief through the urban horizon line, a point of reference common to all city dwellers… Our urban landscapes are bounded by the geometric architecture of buildings, rooftops, walls and even passing trucks. My love of both city and country draws me to scenes where man-made and natural complement one another.”

Sparky hopes the horizon series inspires people to appreciate the common sites around them. He said he hopes those who see his work will develop “an appreciation for the beauty that’s all around us. A lot of these shots in the horizon series are pretty mundane scenes — buildings or rooftops or walls — but with the right lighting, at the right time of day and at the right angle they become extraordinary. That’s around us all the time, all day long. If you don’t notice it, you’ve missed a lot of life.”

The artist had advice for people thinking about exploring the field of photography. And it’s all about being authentic. He suggested, “Go out and look at a lot of work — not just photography, but anything — architecture, performance art, anything — and pay attention to what captures you, what resonates with you. And slowly piece together that puzzle of what it is you are drawn to in other people’s work."

He emphasized that having a knowledge of art history is crucial to finding your own voice. “Be worldly. Take art history courses to realize what has come before you and how whatever you’re doing is different from what’s already been said. Does it build on previous ideas? Is it an extension of them or is it just repeating the same thing? And from that, put together what your special niche is. It’s important to have your own look and for people to recognize that.”

Sparky is preparing for his first museum showing this fall at the Crisp Museum at Southeast Missouri State University. He will have 14 of his images in large scale (40” x 50”) all hung in a special way. He described the set up, “All images are exactly divided in half. There’s always a mid-point between nature and manmade. So when they are all hung consistently, this line creates this a virtual horizon line in the space and it’s almost that’s transformative in terms of how calming it is.”

Find out more about Sparky at his website campanella.com.

Dr. John Day Heals the Body, Mind, Emotion and Spirit

Photo courtesy of Dr. John Day

As a young man growing up in post-World War II Alabama, John Day lived in a household that was dedicated to healing others. His father was a surgeon and his mother was an internist, who often took him on house calls or on her hospital rounds. But no one could predict that an encounter with a pop culture icon would help the future Dr. Day forge his own unique path in the medical profession. 

When Day was nine years old, his mother introduced him to Helen Keller. The author and political activist’s story, who was immortalized in The Miracle Worker, was stricken with an illness when she was just 19 months old which caused her to go deaf and blind. But even as a child, Day new that Keller had senses far beyond the physical realm.

“I knew that Miss Keller could see, despite her physical blindness. I had a real sense of knowing that,” recalled Day of his meeting with Keller in the parlor at her sister’s home in Montgomery, Alabama. “She was very aware of my presence as a child. She offered me her blessing in a particular, intimate way.”

Are You Ready for the PiranhaPocalypse?

Some people are meant to meet. Take for instance Trisha Williams and Joe Unger. When she was a comic book loving, high school kid in Fargo, North Dakota, and he was an undergrad student working at a local games store, they never would have imagined that they would become future life and business partners. In fact it took a long time and many, many miles before Trisha would realize that Joe had been her clerk at Omni Hobby and Games.

After graduating high school, Trisha left Fargo and earned her undergrad degree in Illustration in Minnesota. Then her love of doing art, creating comic books and playing video games led her to The Guildhall at SMU in Texas. There, she became the second woman to get a Masters Degree in Interactive Technology with a specialization in art creation for video games. 

In the meantime, Joe also moved to Minnesota, where he got his Graduate Degree in Marketing and Communications. Stints working as a marketer, starting an online magazine covering travel and games and being a full-time game writer in the pen and paper industry working on games like “of Savage Worlds followed.

Rachel Tribble Creates Art for Peace

Photo by Thomas Winter

Artist Rachel Tribble has always been inspired by peace and the concept that art can produce a feeling of serenity and a connection to the universe. So it was a natural fit for her to join forces with Michael Brooke, publisher of Concrete Wave magazine and pioneer of the Longboarding for Peace movement.

In a recent exclusive interview, Rachel described the movement that started a little over a year ago. "Longboarding for Peace became involved with at-risk youth and started to teach them longboarding as a way of learning about balance in life and learning that you can overcome obstacles… [Michael has] worked in Israel with Palestinian and Israeli children bringing them together for a week at a time teaching them all to skateboard."

She explained that they have also worked in Texas trading weapons for skateboards in an effort to curb violence there. Longboarding for Peace has a goal of building a global Peace Army of 50,000 people. Rachel noted that have already reached people in 30 or 40 countries.

Longboarding for Peace's most recent project is in support of the Native American activist and member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), Leonard Peltier, who was imprisoned for the death of two FBI agents in the 1970s. Many, including Amnesty International, believe he was wrongly convicted and label him a political prisoner. Peace activists have been working for decades to have his sentence reversed.

So when Rachel, a longtime advocate for the rights of Native Americans, found out that Michael was planning to start a project to benefit Peltier, she jumped at the chance to create artwork for three longboards. She explains, "He wanted to do a project that gave Leonard some public exposure to people that didn't know about the case. And he asked me to paint some longboards that would somehow define and quickly tell the story of Leonard, which was almost impossible to do."

While Rachel was challenged initially by how to tell Peltier's tale through her art, she described her ultimate inspiration for the colorful, abstract, linear work she created. "One board has a feel of earth, one board has a feel of darkness and water and the other board is one of red fire… I did some research and I found a letter that Leonard himself wrote this year, 2014, from prison. It's a beautiful letter of thoughts on peace and what it's like to be in the situation that he's in. I took excerpts from the letter that were very fitting for the story and I used Leonard's own voice and his own words to tell his own story and his own statements."

Rachel's one-of-a-kind boards will be auctioned off on eBay with the proceeds going to the Leonard Peltier Defense Fund. She stated, "Longboarding for Peace is a movement I really believe in. It's longboarders and skateboarders and anybody with a good heart and a desire to see peace in the world. It's not a non-profit, it's more of a pay it forward. So essentially we're a network of people who know people who know someone… Nobody's making any money off of it, it just people trying to help other people."

Rachel has always been interested in examining the concept of peace through her artwork and has recently launched a new jewelry line that explores the themes further. While she has been working in this realm for a long time, the current state of the world makes her mission that much more timely. She said, "I'm pretty outspoken about how I feel about what's going on in the world right now, so I'm hoping that people of like minds respond."

Her necklaces, mainly 28" in length, are handmade beads and glass on a weather froze chain. She remarked, "I want to call them Nebular, like a neutron star, a place where new hope and new life is born… to remind people that we all come from the one place, we all live in one earth, in one universe and one solar system and we should all be happy to be together here."

Rachel shared that she gets her inspiration for all of her art from nature and meditation. "I live in a very quiet, rural area and I spend a lot of time in nature. And in those quiet moments I am often inspired by either something in a meditation or some depth of color that I may see in the morning. I get up just before the sun starts to rise and I go outside… I go into mediation as the sun pops the horizon. Everyday it's something different. It's amazing when you do that for a really long time, you start to realize that every single sunrise on this planet is different, every single one."

She continued, "I am completely inspired by nature in those quiet moments… So when I paint I am trying to offer that to other people. When they look at my paintings, or they live with them like many people do, that they also can feel that connection to the universe and that connection to some serenity in their own lives. And my hope is that when people are around my work or they live with my work, that it will inspire them and they will be inspired to do something peaceful and help other people."

Find out more about Rachel's art at her website RachelTribble.com and discover more about Longboarding for Peace at longboardingforpeace.org.

Chuck Connelly Explores “My America” at the Warhol Museum

Courtesy of Chuck Connelly

Almost 60 years ago artist Chuck Connelly was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But for an artist who admits he “hates going backwards,” what matters is that the painter is back in his hometown for his first solo museum show at the Andy Warhol Museum. 

The exhibit, “Chuck Connelly: My America,” is meaningful to Connelly. First of all, it’s dedicated to his late brother Christopher Connelly, Jr.  The artist’s sibling passed away in April and Connelly admitted in a recent one-on-one interview, “My brother was the one I was playing to. He was my biggest fan.” 

The location is poignant on several other levels. As he noted, “It means a lot. Everybody I know who is an artist thinks it means something… Also it’s my hometown and I was a big fan of Andy [Warhol] all the time I was growing up. And I knew the Warhols as a kid. I knew his family, so I had a connection that way. I knew his nephews. They were in my classes… And we were competing in who could draw better and stuff.”

Movie Heroes to the Rescue

Photo courtesy of Movie Heroes

How would you feel if the movie theater where you had your first date was going out of business? What would you do if the cinema where you saw the movie that inspired your career path was closing its doors forever? Well that happened to Keith Walker and Matt Sconce. But they put their best caped-crusader effort into saving their local movie house… and subsequently Movie Heroes was born.

Keith and Matt learned in November of 2012 that their local movie theater, The Met Cinema in Oakhurst, California, could no longer afford to operate. So rather than let their childhood memories fade into oblivion, the independent filmmaker and aerospace engineer sprung into action. In a recent one-on-one interview Keith stated, "That's the place where we saw every single major movie growing up. I remember seeing October Sky there which really inspired me. It's about building rockets, and that's what I ended up doing with my life… So there's a heart for that place and it closed, and it's like, 'Oh, no, we have to save this.'"

Matt added, "For me that was the theater that I went to my first date on, Oliver and Company. So I remember growing up it was always the place to go. For me, being a filmmaker, it was one of the biggest things that inspired me. Because I love to be able to see the stories that other people like, to be able to look into different realities and different places and be able to travel the world."

So how do a filmmaker and an engineer who know nothing about running a theater go about such a daunting task? It was perhaps their naiveté that made the venture successful. Instead of thinking about all the stumbling blocks in front of most theater owners, they took a different approach.

Keith said, "We attribute our success to the fact that we didn't know much about it. Now that we know what we know, we realize that what we were doing was more significant and more risky than we know at the time." They went into the business thinking it was all about the consumer and creating a value added proposition for them. However they did not realize how much control the movie studios have over the theater owners.

They thought they could turn the business around by selling subscriptions a la Netflix. For $19.95 a month a consumer got unlimited access to see any film showing at the theater at any time. They set a goal to sell 3,000 monthly subscriptions and assumed the studios wouldn't care how they got their money as long as they got it.

Keith recounted, "What we found out is, they didn't do it that way. They viewed this as a very different thing. As a result we had to spend a lot of time building trust with the studios and developing audit mechanisms so they would feel comfortable with what we were doing."

So while they were building a business — hiring a staff, ordering concessions, updating the projectors — they were also negotiating with major movie studios to get product. Matt admitted, "For a while we had saved the theater but we had no studios giving us movies. So we had this limbo state for about three months where we wondered, 'Did we save the theater just to not save the theater?'"

But once they gained the studios' trust, business began to flourish. In fact, the model has been so successful for them that the movie house has had better attendance under this subscription model than at any other time in the theater's history.

Keith explained, "People watch way more movies. And by 'way more'  we don't mean 10% more. People are watching at a rate between six and 10 times the national average. A 500 to 900% increase."

Not only have the Movie Heroes saved The Met Cinema in Oakhurst, they have applied the same model to movie houses on Coalinga, Avenal and Red Bluff. And these theaters have more than doubled their revenue. Matt and Keith hope to save many more theaters around the country and are in contact with 60 other cinemas that are interested in the Movie Heroes model.

So if the local theater where you shared your first kiss is on the verge of closing its doors forever, the Movie Heroes might be able to help save it… one subscription at a time. For more info visit MovieHeroes.com.

Kasumi Unleashes Hallucinatory Experimental Film Shockwaves

Image courtesy of Kasumi

Growing up, the artist Kasumi learned to exercise both sides of her brain to be creative. As she explained in a recent one-on-one interview, “I’ve been interested in art as early as I can remember, and with a scientist father and an artist mother, art and technology seemed to go naturally together.”

Dedicating her life to the creative process, Kasumi studied art and music and taught herself filmmaking, which “allowed me to explore new ways of making art.” With her multiple influences she was able to create an original media art form, “cinematic assemblage” that blurs the lines between art, film and music. “Digital technology allows me to create the cinematic analog to the constant hum inside our minds—not just our conscious moment to moment thoughts, but also the vast atmosphere of memories, thoughts, and feelings within which those thoughts arise.”

And with Shockwaves, Kasumi has done just that — creating a film that is a fusion of all of the different art forms in which she has worked, including music, painting, dance, writing and modern digital technology. The film consists of more than 25,000 public domain film samples, choreography, animation, and complex sound design. It’s no wonder that the project was over four years in the making.

Concetta Antico Sees a World of Colors Beyond Your Wildest Imagination

Photo courtesy of Concetta Antico 

When Concetta Antico was a seven-year-old girl growing up in Sydney, Australia, she started painting with oils. She soon became interested in the works of the great Impressionists. Inspired by the masters, she reproduced a Cezanne in one of her earliest works. 

But a typical canvas wasn’t big enough for her vision, so the preschooler took to working on a larger scale — painting the fence in the backyard of her home along a local golf course. As she recounted, “I have a very vivid memory that they used to give me a bucket of water and a brush. And you know the old wood fences that you see around old homes? There was one in the backyard and I would just stand there all day with this bucket of water and a big brush and I’d be painting the wood.”

She went on to cover the walls in her room and recreate famous album covers. Her skills and passion were so clear then when she was just eight or nine years old, she says her mother told her, “‘Concetta, you’re going to be a great artist and an art teacher.’ The reason that has stayed with me is that just a few years after that she passed away very suddenly of cancer… I never forgot it. She became this beacon for me that I would think of her and think of what she said. And, of course, I loved her, so I would think about what she told me and try to guide myself that way because she wasn’t around anymore.”