Fellow Kansan Dennis Hopper can do it all. It's appropriate that he was born in Dodge City, because there has always been a little wild west in him. From the time he burst on the movie scene in Easy Rider right up until today, he has always pushed the envelope in life, the silver screen and as a photographer and artist.
Hopper has a new exhibition showing off his prowess with the camera underway in Los Angeles. He has always taken photographs, including some depicting a more private side of some of the famous folks he knew in his early days in Hollywood.
"He's been a bit of secret," says Douglas Chrismas, director of the Ace Gallery, a private museum and exhibit space on Wilshire Boulevard, which hosted the show -- Hopper's first big retrospective in his adopted home town. "People of course know him as an actor and director, but you ask him, he would say he thinks of himself as an artist first."
"As Hopper, 69, takes his guests on a tour of the exhibit, he seems in fact more artist than actor. He quotes Leonardo da Vinci (on the difficulty of representing the creamy patina of a wet stain on a Tuscan wall). He paraphrases Marcel Duchamp, with whom he agrees when he explains, "An artist is a person who points his finger and says, 'That is art.' " And he speaks in great detail about the difference between digital and film photography, how with the former, "you're spraying with light, and not like a [film] photograph, where it rises up from the chemicals."
I like it when you can find people like Dennis Hopper who are much more than they appear to be on the surface. It reminds us that you have take time to dig deep to figure out what people are really like and what makes them tick.
Recent Comments