0.31 Bert samples, b. 1955  (Page 2/3)

When I was coming to school, that was a really dark point in my life. I was kind of separating myself from my childhood friends and school friends. It was almost like walking out of one world into another world—and for the most part, I’ve never looked back since that time. I just hoped I passed that exam. That was the only thing that was on my mind. And my cousin was really frustrated with it and didn’t think that strongly about it. I remember we walked directly over to my grandparents’ house—they lived just around the block from TSU—and my cousin, he was quiet and just didn’t feel confident. Is this what he wanted to do? Did it fit his needs and skills? I was kind of feeling the same way myself until I saw those murals. And I said, “I could do that.”

Art and music

I was primarily focused on music early-on, and I’ve gone back and forth with that since that time. I’ve been a percussionist mostly. Over time I lost the allure of becoming a musician when I got into college but it was reawakened shortly after that in a way. I started performing rituals to motivate or evoke this imagination to create something. The rituals may have had some connection with my Catholic upbringing—just noticing the rituals one goes through at Christmas and Easter, and observing the pageantry of that. I don’t know that I’ve ever explored the deeper connection to that until I started creating my own kind of rituals when my mother passed away. That was a strong connection to see things on a different level. I felt like another door in my life had closed, or part of my world had closed or changed, and I was looking for that transition. So the mural I created at Texas Southern University chronicles the poignant moments in my life when I felt I was in touch with a deeper connection. It was part of me letting go of things and reaching out to other things. So that’s one of the mysteries of life and the mysteries of art: we make connections, [such as] with my fascination with animals and then the explorations of myths and dreams…that’s when it really started exploding.

It’s taken an interesting turn. The past couple of years I’ve been listening and collecting and researching a lot of music in many parts of the world and being part of a collective of musicians and musicologists and artists that love music as well. When I was at TSU, Kermit Oliver talked about these precise compositions that he observed [in]many of the renaissance artists, and Dr. Biggers spoke of it as well. It was a way for me to start thinking on a very abstract level. You have a theme, an idea, but you leave that very open…you don’t know until you get to the next step what will occur. I was just developing the discipline of creating this construct and seeing what would emerge from that, and music helped me move into that direction. So the connection with music is, once again, that kind of bridge going from an inner reality to an outer reality, but maintaining the connection. It was only after working, sort of studying with Kermit Oliver that I started developing that kind of visualization/meditation, and music became a strong part of that.