Robert Vargas
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TED Talks Daily · Why great art requires risk | Alex Van Halen, David Lee Roth…
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Why Should Artists Rehearse for What Goes Wrong?
David Lee Roth says you rehearse for the things that go wrong, not the things that go right. He has always liked rehearsal better than the show, because the show goes wrong: the elephant is late, the light falls, and the foot pedal electrocutes the elephant. If it goes right, there is nothing to rehearse it for.
Robert Vargas makes his process accessible, so people watching a mural stay with it even when they do not speak the same language. Alex Van Halen says the real trick in music is to do it without saying anything, through the vibration of the playing itself. When his brother Eddie Van Halen played, they never talked about how or what they were going to do. Eddie just played.
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What Do Good Luck Charms Do for Creativity?
David Lee Roth says everybody needs something they perceive to be good luck, because it raises your vibration to a place you would not otherwise reach, and the sparks of creativity that go beyond what is already in you happen in those moments. Some people use a rosary. The object means somebody specific, the way a shrine in a Thai restaurant does.
Robert Vargas keeps five small good luck things, including the Gene Autry wristwatch his mother gave him when he was five, a chess piece from Pop, and his mother's glasses. He looked at the watch that morning. His first mural was at 10, and the next large one was at 15, when Gene Autry came to the unveiling at the Western Heritage Museum in L.A. W
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What Is the Two-step Recipe for Great Art?
Alex Van Halen says the two-step recipe for great art is to do the homework and learn the basics, then break all the rules. That is how it works for Van Halen. Homework means immersing yourself in it, listening and watching everything you can get your hands and eyeballs on, and experiencing as much as possible.
David Lee Roth turns that homework into a song: get your heart broken, then get it broken in a foreign language, then run away and join the foreign legion. Then you have a song. Robert Vargas applies the same test to a painting. The bigger the painting, the bigger the heartbreak. He had just come back from a world art tour, five countries in a month, painting in Paris, London, Greece