Actor, playwright, musician, painter, web designer and tax preparer John A. Moran has his sights set on failure.

“The aspiration of any artist should be to set a goal and never reach it. To me, your ambitions should be so high that the method of trying to attain them makes you better, but you’ll never reach what you want, so you’ll always be a failure,” Moran explains quietly, his English-Irish roots adding a soft lilt to his words.

Failure may be an impossible goal, because Moran has already accomplished an incredible amount in the North Bay’s arts community. He’s a collaborator, an enabler, an idea man who follows through and makes his vision a reality.

In June 2002, he gathered representatives of six local theater troupes to explore the possibility of a festival featuring new plays. As Moran recalls it, the meeting soon segued into a “bitch session” on common problems, and from such argument, the North Bay Theater Group was born. It now has more than 40 members advertising productions on its website and in “combo” ads in local newspapers. The successful New Drama Works Festival was held in 2003.

Argo Thompson, artistic director of Santa Rosa’s Sixth Street Playhouse, says Moran was the driving force behind the unification of local performing arts companies. “I think he realized sooner than the rest of us that we should all just get along. It was time to share our toys,” Thompson says.

Describing Moran as “cantankerous, self-effacing, poetic, cranky and wonderful,” Thompson says his friend won’t object to such a slightly dubious distinction, because he’s also “wickedly funny.” Moran is good at bringing people together, Thompson adds, because “he’s stubborn and he’s persistent.”

Those qualities paid off about a year ago, when Moran lent his experience and talents to help start the Sonoma County Gallery Group, which now has more than 70 members working together to promote the local visual arts. Moran gave the group enough ideas and direction to get started, then got out of the way and let them find their own path, says painter and SCGG member Susan Ball.

“He’s very engaging and funny and very smart. He’s also kind of self-effacing. He doesn’t want to be singled out for thanks or praise,” Ball says. “I think he finds the areas where he sees there could be improvements and then he just jumps right in.”

In March, Moran helped found the fledgling North Bay Classical Music Group. Eventually, he’d love to bring together representatives of the local dance and literary communities, to see how they might shape their own collaborative efforts.

“We’ve got to encourage all people who have the creative urge within them,” Moran says.

The son of Irish immigrants, Moran grew up in South London and was involved with the National Youth Theatre of England. In the late ’60s-early ’70s, he played bass and piano in a rock band in Britain and Europe. Wanting a change of scene, in 1988 Moran visited friends in New Jersey, then in Ukiah and finally in Santa Rosa, where he got a job as a bartender at the much-missed Old Vic bar and restaurant.

He wrote, directed and acted in radio plays which were performed locally, and turned one into a stage play. Eventually, he wrote what he refers to as “20-odd plays,” adding with a grin, “I’d say about five or six of them are pretty good. The rest, shit.” His vocabulary flows easily from highly erudite phrases to what he laughingly refers to as “gutter talk.”

He’s acted in numerous productions and the Sonoma Repertory Theater presented some of his plays. He’s tried his hand at painting. After three years bartending at the Old Vic, he opened a deli with Sandy, his wife of four years. They closed the deli in 2003, and for the past two years, Moran has worked as a graphic artist and web designer on a contract basis for the Cultural Arts Council of Sonoma County.

Moran’s involved in Arts United Day, the Page on Stage book readings and the creation of a collaborative group for local music teachers. He’s learning to read and write music, because it presents an interesting challenge. And during tax season, he works for H&R Block.

Above all, Moran says with a broad laugh and a twinkle in his eye, he’s an angry man.

“I’m angry that [the arts aren’t] more important. And that stimulates in me a desire to change things where I can, recognizing that whilst you can bring people together, you can’t force them to stay together.

“All you can do is instill the common sense of it all.”

–Patricia Lynn Henley

The starving artist living in an attic garret, stumbling about stooped under a low frigid roof with no coins for the gas grate, just a beret to warm him, a rough tumbler of vin ordinaire to sustain him and a small crumb of baguette to feed him, is a lie. Certainly, there are artists who starve, though in the Western world we fervently hope that’s more metaphor than fact.

It’s the romanticism of the starving artist that’s a lie. Ask anyone who’s experienced it: being cold, hungry, thirsty and ill-housed is not conducive to a rich personal expression. And there’s absolutely no reason that deciding to become an artist means that one should also decide on a life of penury and woe. Art–like insurance, mortgages, banking, delicatessens, dry cleaners and dog-grooming shops–is a business. It’s just that so many artists are so damned bad at it.

The Santa Rosa nonprofit Artstart is dedicated to introducing young people to the very startling notion that they can decide to become professional artists without deciding to accept the ancillary burden of the welfare state. Art, reminds the constant mantra, is a business.

Artstart itself, however, is a labor of love. It was begun in 1999 by artists Liz Uribe and Eleanor Butchart, mothers who met when their children went through Santa Rosa High’s innovative ArtQuest magnet-school program together. Butchart had seen a Charles Kuralt television special about Gallery 37, an afterschool Chicago program that got adolescents off the streets and into workshops, galleries and performing spaces, and thought to herself, why not? Why not indeed, agreed Uribe.

Some seven years later, the program has served hundreds of Sonoma County students and produced a number of community artifacts, including 150 painted public benches and 19 public murals found in various spots throughout the county. In Santa Rosa, Artstart’s presence is particularly vibrant, the downtown area dotted throughout with the program’s unique themed benches.

Perhaps the jewel of Artstart’s current work is the program’s contribution to the newly restored Prince Memorial Greenway, where Artstart artists have created oversized murals and recently completed a 208-foot-long mosaic, the first of three planned, that depicts the metamorphosis of the area’s flora and fauna. This section alone took three years to create, meaning that three different summer sessions of students took part in the artistic flux.

Creative director Mario Uribe and executive director Marlene Ballaine are two of the program’s constants. Uribe oversees the student’s projects–including a massive and ambitious upcoming mural incorporating students from Roseland University Prep and Elsie Allen High School in depicting the faces of Hispanic history–and recently took a group on artist exchange to Korea.

Using mentor teachers like sculptor Monty Monty and painter Mary Vaughn, Artstart solicits students from area high schools, usually receiving as many as 150 applications for a program that can accommodate only 35. Artstart is currently a summer commitment and beginning artists are paid $8 an hour, well above minimum wage. Returning students and those who work as aides to mentors can earn as much as $12 per hour.

“The whole idea of the program is to create jobs and job training and offer real job experiences in the arts,” Uribe explains. “Being self-sustaining is really important. That’s one of the things we’re trying to teach them. If you have the right skills and the right training, you can make a living.”

Scraping along on the usual poor scraps of grants and public monies, Artstart supports itself with an annual auction of creatively decorated benches and chairs, and agrees to have its workers take on such private projects as embellishing someone’s patio furniture or creating memorial benches. Rather than being trapped in rigid funding structures, the program will consider most proposals if the price and conditions are right. “The auction pays for the program but commissions are our bread and butter,” Ballaine says.

Currently a seasonal program that does not yet have a home and has had to pull up stakes each fall and regroup each spring, Artstart has tentatively found permanent housing and is looking to expand to a year-round schedule.

“The possibilities are great,” Uribe says. “I’m an artist, so I know that artists have something important to say in the world. This also provides an opportunity for the artists to provide a larger opportunity to the world at large.

“Look at what we can do when we think this way.”

–Gretchen Giles