On Sunday, September 26, 2010, Liane Hansen interviewed Dick Dale as part of Weekend Edition on National Public Radio (NPR). 

During the interview, “the King of Surf Guitar” talked about his musical influences as well as his everyday influences. 

What he said is true for visual artists: artists find material in their daily lives as well as in the traditions of art out of which they make something new.  

Dick Dale describes how he transformed a lion’s roar into a powerful, soaring, rush of sound.  He talks about how he used Gene Krupa’s staccato drumming as a musical idea providing him the material he needed to transform Misirlou, an old folk song he learned from his Lebonese uncles, into a new sound:  he titled his version Miserlou.  

If you think about a painting we study in Informed Perception, Cezanne’s Valley of the Arc, you will understand how Cezanne did exactly the same thing.  

He encountered a mountain.  He reacted to the stimulus by uncovering qualities of power, setness, monumentality, and drama.  

He used visual ideas other artists recorded in their work—the Impressionists for the flood of light and the broken color; Tintoretto for the sense of bigness and a regal monumentality that he establishes via the relationships between the color volumes and space that create powerful beats.  

From the Venetians in general, he builds volumes out of structural color:  light emanates from within, created by the hatchings that build the color volumes.  But it is a cooler and more austere color harmony, a clearer atmosphere (not the hazy, heavy Venetian mysterious atmosphere) which is an adaptation of Florentineclean-cutness via Piero della Franchesca from Giotto.   

He achieves a sense of nearbyness from the Dutch tradition, and those closer to him in time:  Corot, Courbet, and Dupres.  He establishes a focal point set near the front of the picture rather than in the distance.  He does not use the foreground to push back into deep space, but establishes an interest in the up close as it relates to far away.  

Cezanne’s picture has an emphasis on areas, patches, and planes.  He saw this in the shapes of the fields themselves and the color of the soil and foliage, but organized it into patches and planes derived from Poussin who uses planes as a set for his figures in deep space.  

Dick Dale's musical influences come from a rather unconventional mix of sounds, including crashing waves, wild animal roars and folk songs from decades prior. It’s from these sounds that he's crafted some of his most popular songs.

The interview clearly shows how artists think, work, and create.

Click on the play icon below to listen to the 9-minute interview.

To view the full article on NPR's website, click here.