Artist by Night
There are jobs, and there are passions. These are the stories about that space in between.
There’s a famous story about Picasso sketching in the park. In it, a young woman approached the master and asked if he’d sketch her. “Of course,” he said. She sat across from him as he made a single, quick move with his pencil, and handed it over.
“That’s perfect,” she said. “How much do I owe you?”
“Five thousand dollars,” he responded.
“But it took you only a second to draw.”
“Madame,” he responded. “It took me my entire life.”
Usually the tale’s told when discussing proper payment for the arts. That is, patrons should not merely consider the time it took to create that particular piece, but the years of training that led there. But there’s another angle to consider. When Picasso said his “entire life,” he didn’t just mean practicing the act of drawing. He meant every experience he’d ever had leading to that one particular moment in time that allowed him to create that pencil stroke.
This, after all, is what art is: Distilling one’s life into a communicated experience, whether that’s sketching like Picasso, or contorting one’s voice and body in the realm of acting, or using a camera to carefully compose the world into a frame. An artist’s work is necessarily informed by their life, so how is that art affected when artists spend a majority of their days engrossed in the worlds of construction, quality control, and architecture?
These are stories about artists who do just that.
It was nighttime on the island of Alameda when Bonnie Blake-Drucker was approached by a man wearing nothing but a towel.
She was in the middle of the “Alameda on Camera” contest, an event where photographers have 48 hours to haunt the small island that lingers in the San Francisco Bay next to Oakland and capture its spirit, whatever that means. “You’re prowling around like crazy,” she says with a smirk. The search led her to sitting in her car, trying to photograph a balloon that’d gotten caught in a tree. She was about to get just the right shot when she was suddenly interrupted.
“I turn around, and there’s a guy in his towel saying, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’”
“I turn around, and there’s a guy in his towel saying, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’” She explained the event to the man, hoping he didn’t have any problems with her hanging around his house at night. But when the man in nothing but a towel opened up his mouth again, he asked what turned out to be a fateful question: “My friends and I are in the hot tub,” he said. “Want to come on back and take some pictures?”
Like any intrepid documenter of life, Blake-Drucker took him up on his offer. Afterward, as she sat on a bench by the man and his friends to get her bearings, she noticed how the strands of exterior lighting majestically wrapped around the trees to give the entire yard a contrast that sparked something in her imagination. She snapped a casual photo and moved on.
But it was that photo — captured through the combination of happenstance and bravery — that took home the “After Dark” prize in that year’s competition.
The photo lies on a table in her living room, amidst a home filled with charming details, a mix of her creations and things that just seem to fit. There’s an unfinished 1,000-piece puzzle on a table. “I thought it’d be fun, but it’s impossible,” she says. Facing the puzzle is a uniquely-contoured two-person piano bench. “My mother and father played together, so they designed one for both of them.” An old 1937 Grundig radio sits perched next to the fireplace. “I found it in an antique store and could not get the shape out of my head,” she says. “The things I have are just what I think are the most beautiful.”
This dynamic eye has allowed her to win photography competitions, but it’s also given her acclaim as one of the top architects in the field of sustainable and accessible research laboratory design.
In 2010, Blake-Drucker was elevated to fellowship in the American Institute of Architects, the latest gold star in a career that’s included designing dozens of labs in the UC system of campuses. She’s designed everything from labs that perform pharmaceutical compounding, to those that focus on stem cell research, to those working in the futuristic field of nanotechnology. When scientists needs a new lab built, they take their problems and hopes to Blake-Drucker, who figures out the logistics to make their research goals become a reality.
“We’re interested in sustainable design, but there’s this different, secret, unspoken version too. You do well enough, people stay where they are.”
Her personal favorite is the lab for the University of California, San Francisco’s Program in Mesenchymal and Craniofacial Biology. It was that perfect storm that comes with an easy partnership, allowing the project to come in under budget and before deadline. Most rewarding to Bonnie was when the lab provided a kind of home to those working there. “A scientist at one of the labs was recruited later by Johns Hopkins, and she said no, I love my lab too much,” Bonnie went on to say. “UCSF didn’t have to replace her and design a lab for someone else, because she stayed. We’re interested in sustainable design, but there’s this different, secret, unspoken version too. You do well enough, people stay where they are.”
What makes her designs so beloved? It’s part knowing what questions to ask (“I know just enough to get me in trouble”), but also her ability to consider the mental space of the scientists working within her designs. “It’s the technical details — Do you like a nine-foot ceiling? How do you get the air to flow? — but I also want the people to feel refreshed,” she says. “That could be being able to see outside, or having a shadow that makes the structure look different.”
Blake-Drucker has clear-cut delineations of when she’s wearing the architecture hat and when she’s a photographer. “In architecture, when there’s a deadline, there’s a deadline,” she says. “You can’t say, I have a great idea for a photo series, I’ll get back to you in a month. That’s why I travel.” Lately, she’s been on a Japan kick, carving out four visits over the past five years, “photographing like a crazy person” each time. One striking photo that hangs in her dining room is of a man who’s spent the past 30 years making ink sticks used for calligraphy; in it, he stares back with a gaze that only comes with a life lived with precision.
… it’s called mono no aware (moh-noh noh ah-wah-ray), often translated as “the gentle sadness of things.”
Blake-Drucker thinks she’s attracted to Japan partly because of the culture’s awareness of impermanence. There, it’s called mono no aware (moh-noh noh ah-wah-ray), often translated as “the gentle sadness of things.” Perhaps this idea is best exemplified through the Buddhist act of raking sand in rock gardens, wherein monks spend hours upon hours carefully creating the most intricate of designs in the sand, only to wipe it clean and start over the next day.
It’s this idea of impermanence she examines, ironically, in the permanent forms of photography and architecture. How the sun casts a shadow, how a tree’s bending branch mimics the sloping curve of a nearby wall, how wall graffiti is ideally framed by the open window of a van. And yes, even that singular moment of calm in the utterly unique situation of hanging around a backyard with a stranger wearing only a towel.
“As architecture reveals itself as you move around, the city often reveals itself as you walk around,” she says. “The sun hits in a certain way, and in three minutes, or four minutes, it’s gone forever.”
Dress rehearsals are weird. Actors run around half-naked as they clumsily try on costumes they haven’t gotten used to. Lights are on full blast, highlighting every loose strand and ugly wart of the set. The echoing footfalls on the creaky stage aren’t buffered by the presence of an audience, so they sound like demonic forces trying to get in. No one really knows their lines all that well, and when they do, they’re often reciting them only to ghosts.
“How can you say that? It’s Shakespeare!” says the actress playing Meg to the nearly empty auditorium of a community complex deep in the suburbs of the Twin Cities, Minnesota. She speaks with great enthusiasm to no one in particular, since her scene partner is missing from tonight’s rehearsal. So it goes in the world of community theater; sometimes other responsibilities take precedence over the show.
The play being rehearsed is “Leading Ladies,” a comedy by Ken Ludwig centering on two Shakespearian actors who make their way to Amish Pennsylvania in order to scam an old woman out of money. The plan is to pretend that they’re her long-lost nephews, but when they get to town, they realize she actually had nieces. On go the wigs, high heels, and falsetto voices, and the farce begins.
In this production, the character of Meg — the lone legitimate heir of the fortune — is being played by Abigail Heimel, a project manager at Kraus-Anderson Construction. Her job is straightforward in explanation, chaotic in reality: The architect develops the plan, the project manager makes it happen. “The architect has the vision, but we are the reality,” she says. “You’re putting out fires all the time.” Her work has recently focused on healthcare facilities, particularly complex projects that necessitate coordination between the built space and medical and electrical equipment, all in a sterile environment. It’s the culmination of a career trajectory that, somehow, began back in fifth grade.
The plan is to pretend that they’re her long-lost nephews, but when they get to town, they realize she actually had nieces. On go the wigs, high heels, and falsetto voices, and the farce begins.
“When I was in elementary school, I had to answer the ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’ question,” she says. “I literally wrote, ‘Civil engineer.’”
Around the same time, another love began to emerge as well. She’d read an ad in her local paper about an open acting audition, and she brought it to the attention of her parents. “My parents were surprised,” she says. “I was shy and couldn’t talk to people, but, for some reason, it was something I wanted to do. And my whole life changed.”
This toe-dip into performance soon required half-hour car rides from her family’s country home to the big city, leaving her a fish out of water in both places. “At school, I was the theater person,” she says. “At theater, I was this country hillbilly.” But the acting bug took, which is why now she still finds herself — at a time of the day when her co-workers are winding down with television, family time, or maybe a quiet beer — taking the highway out to the suburbs for the next rehearsal.
“I make a rule for myself that if I’m doing a show, I can’t do work,” she says. “But also, I’ve definitely had my iPhone in my costume to answer a work email behind the curtain.”
The schedule is grueling, but the rewards are true. When she finds a role she’s interested in and nails the audition (“You really get numb to the rejections”), her free time dries up to nearly nothing. It’s rehearsals for six weeks, including a week of technicals that goes until 11 o’clock every night, and then it’s the actual performances themselves, and a month of weekends with a few brush-up rehearsals during the week.
“I probably get one day off a week,” she says. “That’s when I’ll do my laundry, get caught up in my life, figure out if my boyfriend still lives at home.”
“I probably get one day off a week,” she says. “That’s when I’ll do my laundry, get caught up in my life, figure out if my boyfriend still lives at home.”
Despite the lack of downtime, the time on set offers something of a relief to her days. “[As an actor] you’re being told where you need to move and where to go,” she says. “For someone in control of every aspect of their job, to have someone tell me what I need to be doing is very nice.”
The lessons learned on set also have a job-world application. As an actor, Heimel spends so much time understanding how she’s presenting herself to an audience — a super-awareness of her face, her vocal tone, her body movements — that it has translated into interactions on the job site. As anyone knows, sometimes these can be stressful situations, full of arguments and disagreements; it’s not rare for an afternoon that one person yells, then the other person yells, and everyone feels better for blowing off steam but nothing’s resolved.
“That’s such an old school way of doing it,” she says. “Being able to keep things in check to where I’m not screaming at everyone all the time, and instead try to relate to someone on a human level… it’s a foreign concept for some, but for me, I love that I can make those connections because of acting.”
Heimel doesn’t see herself hanging up her boots and hardhat anytime soon to pursue acting full-time. She loves it as a hobby, an addendum. “It’s awesome to escape from reality for awhile.” She also loves the role that community theater — as opposed to acting as a paying profession, and all the economic limitations that come with it — plays in the world; the whole point is bringing the arts to those who otherwise wouldn’t get them. “If I introduce ten people who’ve never thought about going to a play before to theater, and they become a patron of the arts, how cool is that?”
Nor can she see herself quitting acting anytime soon, because the rush at the end is too great to give up. Sure, dragging herself to a rehearsal like this every night is difficult. None of the lines are funny anymore, the director is the only one really paying attention, everyone’s mostly going through the motions. But without putting in the work, there’s no payoff when the show opens.
“When you go out there and see someone experiencing it for the first time, and you get to experience it all over again,” Heimel says, a catch of excitement in her voice. “It’s just magical.”
