Random art sample:
candy girl by blueflame

We want to share the story of our journey. This page will hopefully change constantly as ArtEntity grows and changes. We are currently compiling a selection of our email correspondence and early writings about ArtEntity. Until then, these brief personal statements tell a bit of the story.

Jonathan Klein: It all began somewhere between the cornfields and textbooks of rural Ohio, it continued to the dirty streets of Baltimore, and all the way over to San Rafael. It was kept alive because of the passion, determination, and skills of those who are involved.

It will continue to grow.

How can it not?

Dan Gudgel: Largely a writer. At various times, depending on diet, a large writer.
At one time, co-founder, part-owner and half the staff of Abell Designs, Inc., where we made databases and things to look at them through. I have a large body of small work, and a smaller body of large work; fiction, poetry and photography.

In the last ten years, I've been part of several created, creative communities, on varying levels of communality. The college cohort was the first, probably the crucial one. There I started really creating with other people, doing theatre, spoken word performances, taking pictures. The co-operative vegetarian kitchen, and the all-volunteer coffee shop were big influences, too. We all became a little socialist there.

Getting my MA in Writing at Nottingham-Trent, I met a lot more creative people, and started to get some ideas about creative communalism. And I realised how much I missed creating things with friends of mine.

Then Jon and I started web designing, and suddenly we were dot-commers, gleaning an immodest living off the fat of irrational exuberance. We learned things from that, too. Like how to run a business, and what is too high a price to pay for stability.

Through that all, I lived in houses with continually expanding and contracting groups of people; often in cities, too rarely in the woods.

Paul and I have been discussing theology and morality forever. But all of the sudden, he's turned practical on us. Now we have this website, and an album out. It's like it's really happening.

Paul Gaffney: So, I met these guys in college. Jon and Dan were roommates and I lived across the hall. I remember late nights full of debauchery and outrageous antics. We acted in plays together, and did sound design and lights for theatre productions. Jon and Dan directed a couple of plays, quite well, I might add. I slung coffee and played guitar at the cooperatively run campus coffee shop. We all were a part of the campus vegetarian co-op as well and spent our fair share of shifts in the kitchen. When Jon graduated, Dan and I became roommates. I remember one night in particular when we went out to the campus music building and played every single percussion instrument, just to see what noises we could conjure.

Jon lent me the car that got my wife Annie and I to our first date. Dan was the best man in our wedding the summer we graduated almost seven years ago. Annie and I moved to Cleveland, Ohio where I worked first for a Marxist in a coffee shop and then for a local non-profit organization.

While we lived in Cleveland, we frequently visited Jon and Dan in Baltimore, and they lavished us with their dotcom spoils. During our visits we engaged in wild art--connecting computers to make noise, stringing up cloth for painting, singing our hearts out, and talking and dreaming about building communities and schools and revolution.

After two years of slush-filled Cleveland winters, Annie and I longed for a change. I was feeling something tugging at my heart--something deep in the core of my being. That something led me to seminary, then to a Zen practice, and then to my current vocation as a chaplain. One day as I was closing the chaplaincy for lunch, Ivan walked in and blew my mind. As we talked, I realized that his life-long dream was amazingly close to exactly what Jon and Dan and I had been intellectualizing about for all those years. He challenged us to take a real step forward, guided not only by our brains, but also by our hearts.

More than anything, I believe in the power of people working together. I believe that together we can accomplish anything. I am honored to have such good friends. I am honored to have them share my dream and to share theirs with them. Community can feel scary because it is not what we are used to in this society, and at every turn I recognize my own resistance to truly and meaningfullly connecting with others. But when I am creating with someone and really into the project, I feel so deeply connected and it feels so right. Art is the great connector, and we only have to show up and let go.

Annie and I live in San Rafael, California with our cat Sidney. Annie has a B.A. in English Literature, is a pre-school teacher, as well as a talented seamstress, photographer, and graphic artist.