Comfort can wait, but the dream can’t

AT parties, David Derrico tells people he’s a veterinarian, an honorable profession that he thinks makes him sound likable. In fact, he’s a lawyer at an L.A. firm -- but it’s not what he wants to be doing. He wants to be a writer, and, with two Internet-published science fiction books, he is. Isn’t he?

Kelly and Kamille Rudisill, sisters and co-founders of the rock group Karmina, have been performing since they were youngsters. In June, they each graduated with degrees in music from USC. Now they live at home, play all over town and are looking for a record deal.

Sylvie Yarza is a painter from France. She came to Los Angeles for space, both spiritual and physical (her average painting is 10 feet by 12 feet). But getting into a gallery when you lack connections isn’t easy. She works three jobs, sings French songs in a cafe at night and lives in a condo too small for her work.

Michael Brunt and Patrick Marston want to take turns giving each other time to work on their art (Marston is a painter and Brunt is a singer-songwriter). Marston has sold a few paintings and has a gallery show on the horizon, so Brunt figures he should go first. They need to save $20,000 to afford to give Marston a year off. Then it will be Brunt’s turn to put together a CD.

Teka Lark Lo, a Los Angeles poet, is working the alternative machine with everything she’s got. She goes to a handful of readings and other poetry events every week, writes a column for the online magazine Poetix and has her own listserv, “The Lo-down, a.k.a., Fleshy Candy.” She also organizes poetry events in Los Angeles for Tupelo Press, the nonprofit Valley Contemporary Poets and other publishers. None of these are paying jobs. “You have to promote what you do and the genre as well. People have to know who you are. One of these days, I’m gonna get paid.”

What does it take to be an artist in this day, in this town? At what point does an aspiring artist commit fully -- no turning back -- to his or her craft? And what, in the end, counts as success? Each artist must find his or her own answers, the path to which can be a bumpy one, full of unfulfilling day jobs, compromises in creativity and plans put on hold.

Whether finding a way to infiltrate the city’s existing creative community or turning a deaf ear to criticism and rejection, the artistic spark finds a way to burn.

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Juggling jurisprudence

DERRICO, 34, is completely outside the literary establishment. “I don’t even know any writers,” he admits. He took nine months off after graduate school to write his first novel, a science fiction thriller called “Right Ascension.” He wrote his second while working for the Department of Transportation in L.A. (“It was a government job,” he says with a shrug.)

Then he started mass mailing agents whose names he’d taken from literary how-to guides and from the Internet. Nothing. “All I wanted was that foot in the door,” he says. “I just wanted someone to read it.” Finally, he paid $295 to a print-on-demand publisher. “I don’t regret it,” he says, remembering the first time he opened “Right Ascension” as a published book. “What’s frustrating,” he says, clearly discouraged, “is that the system isn’t based on merit.”

His work as a lawyer (unlike his government job) does not allow him time to write at home, much less at work. But Derrico is afraid, especially living in expensive L.A., to quit his day job. He writes in bits and pieces, mostly short stories.

“It’s true,” says Sandy Dykstra, head of one of Southern California’s largest literary agencies, “connections help.” But Dykstra still believes merit matters. “My biggest fiction seller last year, Tinling Choong’s ‘Firewife,’ was pulled from a reject pile, a slush pile, by an intern. And we often go chasing after people based on stories in little magazines or articles they’ve written.” Is it any harder to break in from Los Angeles? “There is still a prejudice against the West,” Dykstra admits. “It’s so easy for the people in New York to proclaim something ‘regional.’ But now there are so many new agents chasing authors, and so many small publishers, the position of writers is much improved.”

Derrico has hired someone to send out his finished work but feels stymied by his all-consuming day job.

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Career building, city by city

YARZA is determined to put her art first. At 36, she carries her enormous abstract oil paintings with her each time she moves. Her paintings are all about movement; some she painted while on roller blades. “I don’t want to recognize any of the shapes; I don’t want any obvious figures. If I see one, I destroy it. I’m trying to create a new world with its own principles,” she says, sitting in her Marina del Rey apartment surrounded by color.

Yarza has studied painting all her life. “I wanted to learn technique,” she explains, but the teachers in France “all kept telling me that painting is dead.” They talked about painting, it seems, more than they actually painted.

Inspired by the Abstract Expressionists in America, Yarza worked her way to the Art Students League in New York, where she was immediately offered a scholarship. She showed in galleries and felt inspired by the open, positive atmosphere in New York, compared with France, where she says the process was all about criticism, about “breaking you down.” But it soon became impossible to afford the city, so she came to L.A.

In two years, Yarza has exhibited in several low-key venues. And while it is difficult to survive and find space to paint, she still elicits a sense of freedom and space within her work. To make money, Yarza, whose expenses hover around $1,600 a month, teaches tango, gives French lessons, sings at Cafe Marly in L.A. and does several other odd jobs, including computer illustration and working as a hotel receptionist. Still, she believes it would be even harder in Europe.

She has many times put off marriage and family. She loves children but is fierce about her career as a painter. And what with moving all over the world and working strange hours, it’s been hard to meet the right person. To get the artist’s visa most visiting artists covet, she will have to have gallery shows, recognition by a U.S. institution, which will give her three to five years here. Then she can apply for a green card. Until this happens, Yarza is not comfortable leaving the country for fear she will not be allowed back in, so her mother visits her here once a year or so.

Networking may be key to Yarza’s success. The most distinguished artists in New York spend a lot of time at parties, says Peter Gould, one of three directors of the venerable, 30-year-old LA Louver Gallery in Venice. “And I think the artists that network in this way gain a lot by doing it.” Gould says many new artists come to him through other artists the gallery has represented. “We keep a mindful eye on artists graduating, visiting their studios and watching the progress of their work; developing a dialogue,” he says.

But other factors play into the decision to pick up a new artist as well: The gallery has to believe in an artist’s longevity, their stick-to-it-iveness.

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Finding their own voice

BY the time Kamille and Kelly Rudisill were 5 and 7, respectively, their talent was unmistakable. In 1994 (at 8 and 10), their parents, Robin and Peter, enrolled them in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s five-year program. Two years later, they were earning first-place and grand-champion trophies in state competitions. They attended the San Francisco School of the Arts as theater majors and then USC’s Thornton School of Music. While in college, they played several acoustic gigs (sometimes with Dad playing percussion) at such L.A. venues as Temple Bar, Genghis Cohen, the Mint and the Viper Room. In 2001, they started Karmina, named for their little sister, Petra Karmina.

The girls began courting such labels as Universal / Motown Records in their mid- to late teens. “It’s a mean, small world,” they agree.

“At first, we’d get all dressed up in fishnet stockings and heels and J.Lo sunglasses to go to these meetings,” says Kelly. “[Then] we decided to hang back a little and not try so hard to get signed until we knew exactly what we wanted.” In the meantime, they have developed a fan base and created a website.

Kelly, 21, and Kamille, 19, who live with their family in Venice, love to perform, the bigger the audience the better. But they agree that it no longer feels so important to sign a contract with a big label. As time passes, they have developed a keener sense of who they are as composers and performers (no more fishnet stockings). They talk about producing themselves. “The music business is more about business,” says Kamille. “It used to be only the major labels. Now there’s more indie labels and more artists are inspired, like Joni Mitchell or Ani DiFranco, to say [no] to big studios. Who wants to be stuck being marketed as the next Hilary Duff?”

As for timelines, Kelly would like to have a child in her 20s. Kamille says let’s work as hard as we can now for five or 10 years and then settle down to have families. For right now, like Yarza, Kelly and Kamille are determined to succeed. Their parents have taken on managing Karmina full time.

Success is an ongoing struggle as they define who they are and what their sound is. Even their father sometimes tries to make the songs more appealing to the public, which makes Kamille bristle. The older they get, it seems, the stronger their sense of their own talents becomes. “No offense,” says Kamille, “but I want to sell the music I make.”

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Rhyme and reinvention

LO is wiry, energetic and outspoken. “I’m actually a shy person,” she says, though it’s hard to imagine. “But my desire to get published is stronger than my shyness.” Lo, 31, has little interest in academia or grant applications. “I’m more of a satirist,” she explains. “I use my poetry for social commentary.”

She would like to get published but says it’s difficult, even in the alternative press. “Poets don’t have agents,” she says with a laugh, “and if they do, they don’t tell you who they are. Everyone says you have to pay your dues. Ten years ago I was reading in bars. I would never go to an open mike. My friends and I thought that open mikes were for poseurs. Every 10 years you’re a different person.”

As for the money, Lo finds that she often gets fired from her day jobs, as a receptionist or typist. “I tend to put the thing I’m getting paid for aside,” she says without a visible shred of remorse. “I want to die in a motel room with an empty quart of Scotch and no teeth. If I wanted to get rich,” she says, opening her hands in a hopeful, upward way, “would I be a poet?”

Lo’s monthly expenses -- rent, gas, entertainment, DSL, electricity -- total around $1,500 a month. She lives in Los Feliz but is always on the lookout for the next affordable, somewhat hip neighborhood. “I’m always struggling, but that’s part of the game,” she says, refusing to buy into the suffering-artist persona.

Would she prefer to work at a job more in line with her interests? Sure, but “in the alternative world,” she says, “there are no extra jobs.” Lo insists that L.A. is the best place to be for her. Not only is there “a lot of love in the poetry community” (despite the withholding of agents’ names), but it’s also a place where you can pick up and move and generally reinvent yourself whenever you want. “It’s easier here to talk to anybody; to be a nobody and talk to a somebody.”

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Mutual encouragement and support

MARSTON is 39. By the time he was in kindergarten his parents had already noticed his creativity and his fascination with aesthetics. As a college student, he was persuaded by his parents and advisors to take a more practical approach to his future, earning a bachelor’s degree in commercial arts two years before graphic design took off on the Mac. He ended up working as a graphic artist in Disney’s human resources department in Orlando, Fla. Without computer skills, it was as close as he could get to practicing his art.

In 1994, Marston moved to L.A. and fell in love with someone who gave him the gift of a year off work. “I didn’t have to justify anything or choose between the practical and the creative. He just gave me permission to paint.” Marston took classes in fine arts and, for the first time in his adult life, he was surrounded by other painters.

When the idyll ended, Marston went back to work, joining the development department of the Center Theatre Group, then becoming special events coordinator for the Kirk Douglas Theatre and the Gay & Lesbian Theatre Alliance. “The hardest thing sometimes,” he says now, “is just getting to the canvas.”

He met Brunt, a singer-songwriter who not only gave him permission but insisted that Marston paint. Together, they save $400 a month, hoping to build a nest egg to allow Marston to take another year off work to concentrate fully on his art. He is emotionally ready to dive into it full time.

“What I know,” he says, “is that if I never risk it, I will always wonder what it would have been like to give it everything I’ve got.”

Marston recently left the Center Theatre Group, deciding to work part time in special events at MOCA, where he is surrounded by painters and artists. He has, this year alone, sold a series of smaller works and three large paintings. Lately, he’s been filling large canvases with iconic shapes -- a goldfish, a lotus blossom, a box of chocolates or a fire hydrant -- and surrounding them with text inspired by Buddhism or other spiritual traditions (like the poems of Rumi). He’s working on a set of small oil paintings of goldfish for the Smallest Art Gallery in California, at the Santora Arts Complex in Santa Ana.

“In many ways, I’ve been living in a vacuum, not having other painters to talk to,” he says. He has sold several paintings to friends and neighbors but worries about falling into the trap of interior design: decorative paintings that “match the sofa.”

For his part, Brunt is not as concerned with success or producing a CD. It’s not that he doesn’t dream of performing and producing, it’s just that he is content, at 36, to move slowly and methodically toward that goal, enjoying the rest of his life and helping Marston “get to the canvas.” He’s used to waiting. When he was 7, his cousin got a guitar and Brunt’s first thought was, “that’s mine” -- though it took him 12 years to get one of his own. He grew up singing in the choir in his school in Long Beach and listening to U2 and John Denver.

Brunt, whose father left when he was 16, had a turbulent childhood. There was little music in the house he grew up in. When he got his first guitar as a gift, he wrote his first song, “Little Boy.” “I hadn’t died, I wasn’t a hooker, I wasn’t into drugs, I had survived!” he says, still in awe. At 25 he moved to Atlanta, wrote more songs, then came back to L.A. to perform at open-mike nights. He sold a song for the movie “The Circuit,” made $5,000, hired a producer and a mixer and started writing in earnest.

But the money ran out.

He worked at the Fox Family Channel in the animation department and at MTV on “The Osbournes.” Every once in a while, he’d give a CD with one of his songs to some decision-maker or producer. If they didn’t like it, he just tuned them out. “I’m in it for the joy,” he says.

Brunt has a music arranger who works with him once a week. He’d like to start going to open-mike nights again, putting together and arranging songs. He sends stuff out and hopes to start his own website. He’s forming a network, meeting people at parties, giving them copies of his songs. Like the Rudisill sisters, Brunt says the days of depending on big studios for your success are over. “I’m not too concerned with breaking in,” he says. “I’d like to be found.”

Among these three worlds, publishing, painting and music, the music world seems to have the largest number of paths to success. Writers must (unless they choose to self-publish or Internet publish as David Derrico did) find an agent who will represent them and then find an interested publishing house. Painters must find a way to make their work stand out enough to be chosen for a gallery and, while L.A. has more galleries than almost any other city in the U.S., it is still a difficult and often arbitrary process to get one to show your work.

As for success, the only thing an artist can really control is his or her own definition of it. Brunt is happy simply when he gets to play. Marston dreams of a big studio and the financial freedom to paint. Yarza cares first and foremost about keeping her spirits up and her creative energy alive. The Rudisills want to stay true to their music, even if it means avoiding the kind of success the major labels could provide.

“I am not a struggling artist,” says Brunt. “I don’t feel like it’s this big burden to be an artist. As soon as I let go of all that and realized it was all about the pleasure of singing, I fell back in love with it.” Commercial success, he says, doesn’t mean everything. “I’m not nothing without it.”

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Contact Reynolds at [email protected].