Q&A with Joe Forte: The Visual Artist and Filmmaker Discusses His Creative Process and Latest Exhibit
Joe Forte and I discuss his latest exhibit, the creative process, and how his mixed media collage work and filmmaking inform one another.
Joe Forte entered my life through my now-wife Lindsay Devlin who would pace back and forth across our LA apartment, cell phone pressed to her ear, breaking a TV legal drama with him. She was a producer at the time, he a screenwriter hot off the success of his debut film FIREWALL (2006), and they were developing a pilot together. The pilot ultimately went nowhere, like so many projects in Hollywood, but out of that unfruitful collaboration, we earned an invitation to an art show at Bergamot Station Arts Center in Santa Monica.
Now, if you’ve lived in LA, you know how dubious you should be of invitations from acquaintances to any kind of art show, comedy show, stage play, poetry jam, whatever. Just don’t do it; it almost always ends poorly. Which is why I asked, “This screenwriter you’re working with is, like, a painter?” Yeah, sure, I’d heard that before. But Lindsay assured me it would be fun, or at least different, so we climbed into my car, crossed the city in rush hour, and walked into a gallery that, from the outside…
