...and I am an ethereal girl

Later I worked for him at City Museum, on Washington Avenue in downtown St. Louis, in his Museum of Mirth, Mystery and Mayhem. (I manned a concession stand which advertised itself as the "Shrine of Shameless Hucksterism.") I've also attended concerts-cum-happenings he's staged with the band Switchback. One such event showed off a new buffalo sculpture in a neighborhood park. Attendees were encouraged to wear hobo attire, eat communal stew, and toast marshmallows at a bonfire. Naturally, this was known as the "Buffalo Hobo Inferno."

Christman's an interesting guy to know.

This is what he told me about how he came to take up his vocation as an artist:

The kind of art I did as a kid was influenced by cartoons.

One of the tests of artistic ability in grade school was if you could draw well.

I could; I was just born with that ability. My dad had it.

And I've always been blessed with ideas that come quickly and readily.

Whenever there'd be a poster contest I would come up with pretty interesting poster ideas, even for religious themes. I still remember some of the religious posters that I did.

I remember that there was one with this big open book and there was a chalice and grapes coming over it and it had some scripture quote. It was graphically strong.

Where most kids would be uncomfortable with the technology of poster making, I wasn't.

That led into high school.

At SLU High there were always posters for every event and football game. We used to do gigantic posters that would hang on the side of the buildings and they would always have, like, cartoony images of the Billiken dressed in the outfit of a Spanish conquistador with his foot on the head of the Collinsville Kahok Indian.

I always thought of myself as an artist.

As a real young kid I would take things apart, electrical toys and electrical things. When they stopped working I would start taking the motors out of them. I would make robots out of old quaker oats boxes because they were nice cylinders and I would put this rotating flashlight head on.

I always went through trash. One of my greatest thrills was to get up real early in the morning and walk the streets going through commercial buildings' or people's alleys and just finding neat stuff that they were throwing away.

Then I studied art and art history in college -- this is '65-'69. It was generally considered by the "adult" world that if you're studying art, you're going to be a commercial artist. Of course I would bristle at that notion: "Commercial art‹ha! I'm a fine artist, I'm a pure artist." But oddly enough, I was raised in such a Middle Western pragmatic situation that after I finished college as a sculpture major, there wasn't any living to be made at that; I drifted into painting theatrical scenery, sign-painting, and things of that nature. Fortunately, through being at the right place at the right time, I landed into that profession [sign-painting] which I did for about ten or fifteen years.

Then at the age of forty I all of a sudden panicked.

My dad was a very talented self-taught artist. As he got older I would buy him for his birthday a sketchbook or watercolors. He finally just wouldn't even accept them.

I just had this tragic feeling that if you let a gift lie fallow for too many years, all of a sudden you can't get back to it. It's atrophied. I saw this in my dad and I said, "Man, in another quick ten years I'm gonna be fifty (the age of my dad when he couldn't even accept a sketchpad). If I wanna be an artist-type artist, I better make a radical transformation."

I discussed [this] with my wife and I scuttled the sign business I went and took a class in New York at the School of Visual arts with Milton Glaser who's sort of a design guru.

I'd heard about these two nuns from Rosati-Kain who were art teachers there. These two nuns took this week-long intense seminar with Milton Glaser and after they came back they left Rosati-Kain and went back to graduate school and got master's degrees.

This School of Visual Arts class with Milton Glaser really was transformative. It was not about art, it was about seeing and spirituality and food. I was mesmerized by the whole experience.

[The class] was only about 26 people and it cost about 1200 dollars for a week. You stayed in New York; your classes went from 9 to 8 o'clock at night every day for 5 days.

He said, "Before you come to the class I want you to write a complete diary for the week before you come of everything that you eat and drink and ingest. I want minute detail: '7:30 am: One glass of orange juice, 2 vitamin C tablets' -- whatever you put in your body." You had to keep a meticulous diary. He said, "It will be collected and used during the week for an assignment." I thought, "Well, this is an odd kind of a thing for this intense graphic design seminar." At any rate I did it very faithfully.

About the fourth day he said, "This is the assignment. I'm going to redistribute everyone's food diary; you will get someone else's. I want you to use your powers of intuition. What sort of person do you intuit from this dietary information?"

He said, "Then I want you to do two portraits of the person on seven inch by seven inch paper. I want you to use your weakest skill in one portrait--whatever technical thing you feel totally inept at. I want you to do the second one in your best skill. I want you to put a one-word description underneath each picture. Then I want you to write a written description of the person. Just write whatever comes to you. It's not a detective thing where you're looking for clues, just let it come."

The next day he has us put all the portraits on one wall that were done in the weak skill, and then the other portraits that were done in the strong skill [on the other]. All the portraits done with the weak skill just leapt off the wall and all the ones done in the best skill were just‹they were nothing. It was like black and white, especially when you saw 25 or so all together.

He didn't say a lot, he taught a lot but it was not always with excess verbiage. The lesson there was that oftentimes our weakness produces the greatest or the best kind of work rather than what we consider our strengths.

Before he gave us our assignment, he said, "These will produce some very unusual results." There may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy to this.

He said [afterward], "Did anybody have any unusual experience?" This one girl who became a friend of mine said, "Yes, I had a very disturbing experience with this."

She said, "I started the writing part of it naturally enough and then all of a sudden it was like automatic writing." She filled up twelve pieces of paper, both sides; it just kept going and going.

[Glaser] said, "Why don't you read it?" So she goes into this description of a woman. On one of her portraits she wrote the word "arch"; she said, "I am like the arch in everyone's life, the architectural [object] that everyone else is supported by. I take care of everyone." She starts going into personal stuff. It goes into an episode about an abortion attempt when she was very young, she moved far away from her parents because of the inability to--it was all real psychological, on and on and on it went. I forget all the details of this but she was getting information from this food description that was about this person's emotional life, family life and on and on and on and on. So finally she reads this whole thing. It was like a little novella of a woman who really in a way was suffering.

All of a sudden, Milton Glaser says, "Whose diet did you have?" And it was this guy from Canada named Neil. Everybody lets out this huge guffaw. Neil gets up and he's shaking. He says, "Wait a second, I have to tell you something. I don't ever make anything other than a glass of water for myself. Everything that goes into me is made and handed to me by my wife. She makes everything I eat and everything I drink. I don't want to comment about the abortion thing, I have no comment about that but everything else she said is a portrait of my wife--and I have a picture of my wife in my wallet." And he takes out this picture of his wife and he takes it up to the portrait and it was a beautiful--this woman had done a portrait of his wife including her hair color and everything; it was truly remarkable.

Glaser said, "The simple thing that I want you to know is that as artists you will get information from beyond your five senses."

He said, "You probably believe that your five senses are what your artistic toolbox is composed of but it's more than that."

He gave everybody this assignment on the last day: from noon until noon the next day they had to produce a magazine, what is known in the graphic industry as a mockup, a prototype that you would present to investors. Everybody's going "What the f-?" and he said, "Don't worry, in fifteen years [of teaching] everyone has handed this in on time. Ordinarily this would be like a six month project, but you'll form teams, you'll pick topics, and within the space of 24 hours you'll have a beautiful presentation-to-investor-quality magazine." So we vote on topics and form teams. The next day these beautiful slick pieces of magazine art are there. A garden magazine had a popup garden, I worked on a cartoon magazine with these other guys...I was just a gofer. I said, "I can draw some cartoon-type ads but I don't have any skills with production. I'll be happy to get coffee and sandwiches." They were really great people‹they gave me assignments to illustrate, an ad for the back cover, a silly ad, a logo design while they did all the slick magazine [production]. Other groups it turned out split apart completely. There would be strong personalities and what would happen is half of the team would just walk away and the thing was produced by [the other] half.

He said, "This lesson is about two things. One is how much you can accomplish in a remarkably small amount of time. No one in your trade would believe such a thing could be done. This will prove to you what you can do. Secondly, the key to any artistic collaboration is good will. Some of these groups have broken apart because the good will was lost. The other groups that maintained the entire group process--something kept the good will alive.

My eternal gratitude is to Milton Glaser for teaching [that way]. He also exposed to me the idea that there is a connection between artists and priests. He even used the word "priest." The job of a priest is to help people see spiritual truths which they innately know but they need for someone to say, "Here's spiritual truth, this is contained within you, but here's how you can be helped to see it more fully."

He said artists actually take the visual world which people have an innate sense of and they help them to see it. They bring people to see and understand visual truths which they innately have within them. [Artists] help clarify it.