Ed Frakes has been painting for over 50 years. Now 71, Frakes describes his life as an artist and explains the meaning behind some of his paintings in this audio slideshow.

For information about his art, upcoming shows and sales, contact Ed Frakes at: 510-794-1368

By Guo Shipeng

Four of the Oakland Chinatown’s best Cantonese Opera performers will make their debut in November on the prestigious stages of Canton, the art’s birthplace in south China, in recognition of their artistic achievements.

The amateur performers from the Red Bean Cantonese Opera House will attend the 5th International Cantonese Opera Festival, a four-yearly event that attracts artists from around the world and features simultaneous performances on several stages every day in the week from Nov 10-16.

“I am certainly very proud that we can perform in Canton, but in the mean time I am quite nervous, because it is the orthodox and the ultimate authority in Cantonese Opera,” said Linda Lee, 62, Red Bean’s vice president and one of the four Canton-bound performers.

“We who learn to play here are definitely not as good,” Lee said during a break from her rehearsal on Saturday October 11 in the Red Bean Opera House on Webster Street.

 Laura Ma, 52, Red Bean’s treasurer who’s also flying to perform in Canton, had a more relaxed attitude. 

“It will be a performance as usual, with a different audience though,” said Ma.

In addition to the four performers, more than 30 Red Bean members would make the trip to Canton and for all of the Bay Area the number would be over 100, Ma said. 

“It’s like the Olympics in Cantonese Opera and it is a great party. We’ll go there shopping, watching the shows and seeing the big stars and the respected predecessors in the art,” said Ma, who went to previous Canton festivals with other Red Bean members but did not have the chance to perform.

Cantonese Opera is a main subtype of Chinese opera and like other subtypes, it involves music, singing, martial arts, acrobatics and acting and shares a centuries-old repertoire. It originates in areas near Canton, or better known as Guangzhou nowadays, capital city of the southern province of Guangdong where most of the Oakland Chinatown’s residents come from.

Founded by Liang Jing, a famous Cantonese Opera actress, in 1996, Red Bean now boasts a membership of about 50, but more than 100 people, including many volunteers, are involved in its activities every year, which culminates in its sensational annual performance in San Francisco in the summer. It mainly relies on donations from the Chinese community for funding.

“Almost all the members are over 40 years old,” said Lee, who had always played male characters since she started learning Cantonese Opera in 1995. “Before that we have jobs and kids to worry about. Now we are free to have some fun by devoting ourselves to the opera.”

Lee, who moved the U.S. from Hong Kong more than 30 years ago, and other Red Bean members cited their childhood memories back in China of accompanying parents to Cantonese Opera shows for their love of the art, but passing on that passion to the American-born young generation in the Chinatown was a difficult task.

“I am worried about the future of the art here, but what can I do?” Lee said. “It’s hard. Not so many kids read Chinese.”

Lee at least has done a perfect job on her youngest son Erick Lee, 25, who has been called a wizard in Cantonese Opera by assuming his first major role at the age of 13 and being able to tutor kids in Red Bean’s youth troupe now. 

“He has to memorize all the lines and moves because he cannot read the scripts,” Lee said. “But he loves it.”

For a traditional art that is also facing declining popularity among young people in industrializing, modernizing China, recruiting new talents off its home soils in the U.S. was done mostly through referrals, said Ma, Red Bean’s treasurer.

“It has never been a very hot art and the kids find it a little strange, so we turn to friends and friends’ friends,” said Ma. “The Red Bean has been fairly successful in this regard, considering the difficulty and the fact that none of us is professional.”

Jamie Ma’s two sons and daughter are among the two dozen teenagers trained by the Red Bean’s youth troupe scheme in recent years and have starred in a number of big performances.

“My sister works here. That’s how my children started Cantonese Opera and I followed their suit a year later,” said Jamie Ma, 50, a government clerk from Union City.

She now drives to the Oakland Chinatown every Saturday for her own practice and again on Sunday for her children’s training session.

Donald Lee, Linda Lee’s husband, said it was only a matter of time for Cantonese Opera as a traditional art to disappear in Chinese American communities with the generational changes.

 “But we hope to see the art prosper, or at least continue, for some more time in the rest of our life.”

Since the age of 14, when he first picked up a guitar, Michael McNevin knew he wanted to be a musician. During his career, this singer-songwriter has opened for artists such as Johnny Cash and Richie Havens and produced four albums. But McNevin’s music is not his only form of artistic expression. When he’s not busy writing songs, he’s drawing detailed scenes of the events he sings about on…an Etch-a-Sketch.

The Etch-a-Sketch is a toy that has delighted and confounded children, and adults for over 50 years. With a thick red frame, users twist two white knobs that move a black line up and down or side to side on the screen. What seemed like magic as a child is actually a plastic screen coated with aluminum powder that is scrapped off by moving the knobs. Drawing with the tool is difficult because there is only one line that can be used to create the image and it cannot be broken. To start over, just shake the toy and the image is erased.

As a child, McNevin said that the Etch-a-Sketch was one of his favorite toys, and he drew on it frequently. After seeing that he was able to create curves in his scribbles, McNevin began to challenge himself.

“I remember thinking, if curves can be done accidentally, they could be done on purpose if I could figure out how,” he said.

McNevin said he spent much of his free time as a child teaching himself how to draw curves and diagonals on the toy  until it came naturally to him. Despite having taught himself this unique skill, McNevin said that he did not have a strong “artistic eye” and mostly drew cartoons.

But as he grew older, his interest in the Etch-a-Sketch waned. It was not until McNevin was well into his music career that he would revisit this childhood passion.

In the mid-1990s, when McNevin was not touring, he was living alone in a cabin in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. One afternoon, an old high school friend visited and convinced McNevin to help him look for a toy he had as a child.

While McNevin was walking through the aisles of the store, he saw the Etch-a-Sketch.

“Here he was looking for his old childhood toy that he wanted to find and I ended up going home with mine too,” said McNevin.

From that moment on, McNevin started drawing again and his sketches became increasingly complex. His long road trips on tour provided ample time to practice his art.

Even though friends would compliment his Etch-a-Sketch drawings, McNevin said, “I didn’t think anything of it.” While he was stopped in St. Louis as part of a five-week tour, he did a drawing of the Gateway Arch and a fellow songwriter took a picture of it. After the photo was developed, McNevin realized he could capture and distribute his images through prints, much like other artists do.

McNevin erased the St. Louis drawing and headed to Wisconsin for another concert. While there, he drew a scene of a local bar.

“I drove 2,000 miles with that drawing, lying flat in the bed of my truck,” he said.

During those 2,000 miles, McNevin stopped to play concerts in half a dozen other states and continued to draw and take pictures of his sketches. In Hastings, Nebraska, a local gallery owner saw McNevin’s sketches and put pictures of them up in his gallery. At his next concert in Salt Lake City, McNevin said, “People offered to buy the drawings, the matted photos. I thought, wow. Ok.”

When McNevin returned home from the road trip, he wrote the songs that would become his “Sketch” album and decided to illustrate the lyrics with sketches. “At that point, the concept for a record that had art going with it had kind of surfaced,” he said.

Inside McNevin’s small and cluttered music shop, The Mudpuddle, over a dozen Etch-a-Sketch drawings are mounted on the wall. Next to a rack of his CDs are full-sized glossy prints of his sketches that he sells.

McNevin’s artwork has extended beyond the music scene. A photo of one of his sketches, an image of a little league baseball game, hung in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. for one year. The song he wrote that accompanies the sketch is now in the Hall of Fame’s baseball song collection and he had the opportunity to play several concerts there.

McNevin is moving forward on recording a new music album and plans to start touring again. While he said that the days of five-week road trips are over, he still plans to continue using the Etch-a-Sketch to document his adventures and hopes to add more images to his collection.

To learn more about McNevin and hear some of his music visit his website: www.michaelmcnevin.com