Jim Conniff is a retired professor whose been living in the Bronx since 1920, using every moment of his spare time to make stuff. Geometric doodles, mixed-media collages, scraps of poetry, sculptures. You know, whatever he feels like. He doesn’t consider what he makes art, and it’s rare that anybody outside of his own family sees it. Except his daughter Claire is blowing up his spot by creating a blog dedicated to archiving his idiosyncratic creative output, and a Kickstarter project to physically preserve them.
Lying on the floor of Jim’s office, mostly around his IBM Selectric typewriter, are scraps of paper filled with first drafts of poems or beginnings of final versions that had typos too glaring to fix. These scraps show Jim’s process as he ventured into a more verbal form of creative expression. He wrote hundreds of poems—some he kept for himself, but most he sent out to family members… Those that my family received mostly involved talking animals or misunderstood monsters. The characters went on strange adventures with my brothers and me, or had silly conversations with my grandfather.
There should be an entire sub-section of Kickstarter devoted to The Latent Artist. The creative spirit that lived and made and worked — for sheer joy, driven by entirely hidden mechanisms — never seeking recognition, but receiving it in retrospect. I don’t mean to be overly sentimental (I am overly sentimental), but what a remarkable thing. This artistic hibernation! Decades of devotion to an ambition completely internal: cultivated, nurtured, and sustained within the cyclical intimacy of a private dream. I wish, I wish.
