John DiGeorge, who uses the artistic pseudonym Mutsu Crispin (a variety of apple), grew up outside Atlanta and spent many years drawing, playing with Legos, leafing through cartoons and comic books and exploring the woods — all of which were “pretty central/formative activities,” he says.
Forty-six-year-old DiGeorge of Brattleboro, Vt., went on to study visual art and filmmaking at Harvard University and, after living in Boston and New York City, relocated to the area.
Over the years, he’s been involved in diverse artistic projects: teaching film, making puppets, painting, producing an independent film, photographing objects, and developing a body of sculpture work inspired by some of those those photos.
DiGeorge described one of his exhibits, “Chance Encounters,” which just ended. I squeezed hundreds (sometimes thousands) of bouncy balls between large sheets of Plexiglass, then hung the sheets upright to create dynamic patterns of color. This process of collecting objects and arranging them as a larger whole has always been compelling to me.
He said his creative process tends to differ with each new piece.
“I approach each new piece with a loosely held intention, usually reaching toward whatever is most charged for me at that moment in my life — a resonant or challenging recent experience, a conflict with someone, some new sense of connection or revelation I’m trying to clarify.
When asked how he began “Chance Encounters,” DiGeorge said he placed a sheet of Plexiglass on low, level sawhorses, then dropped big handfuls of balls on the sheet; balls bounced and ricocheted off each other, rolling here and there.
“I repeated the process several times, coralling and nudging the balls a bit, but mostly I waited for a theme to appear,” said DiGeorge.
He said then he and his assistant placed another sheet of Plexiglass on top of the arrangement, bolting the sheets together to squeeze and hold each ball in place.
DiGeorge said he applies for a lot of public art commissions, and tries to spend at least a couple of hours each day working on his long-running feature film project, “Redbelly” — at this point, that mostly involves finessing the soundtrack, trimming fat where he finds it and fixing any loose threads.
DiGeorge said he chose the artistic pseudonym Mutsu Crispin several years ago when he was working on a farm for the summer and discovered battered old crates, stacked floor to ceiling, labelled “Mutsu Crispin.”
“I liked the juxtaposition of the Japanese word with the almost dopey-sounding English “crispin,” so I decided to use it for my film production company — and as a general art alias,” said DiGeorge.