March 10, 2011 | By Jason Kehe, Special to the Los Angeles Times
John Frame and his sculptures get moving
at the Huntington Library
A burst of inspiration got John Frame out of his year-long slump. Five years later, that inspiration can be seen in ‘Three Fragments of a Lost Tale.‘
By early 2006, John Frame had given up on art. He had whittled away the year before in silence, as static in his work as the motionless sculptures that populated his cramped Wrightwood studio. He couldn’t start a single project. Everything seemed wrong.
“I had shut down,” he said.
But then, a week or two after closing his studio door for good, he woke up from his artistic torpor — at 2 in the morning, inspired like he’d never been before.
“It came as a single download,” Frame said. “It was all the characters, it was dialogue, it was sets, it was plot, it was story line — everything, it was all there.”
In the morning, his wife brought him a stack of paper, and in a state somewhere between waking and sleeping, he started writing — “like taking dictation,” (continues)