May 27, 2013

Preview of John Lloyd Young’s Interview with Art Works!

May 27th, 2013

JLY
John Lloyd Young

Art Works, the official blog of the National Endowment for the Arts, recently posted a terrific interview with Tony Award-winner John Lloyd Young! Check out a preview of below by blogger Paulette Beete:

NEA: What do you remember as your earliest experience with the arts?

JOHN LLOYD YOUNG: My first experience with the arts was as a preschooler, gluing alphabet letters, alphabet pasta, onto construction paper to learn the alphabet. And, sort of, happily, as an adult, I also do visual art besides acting. I have art works in gallery on the East coast and the West coast and it is an assemblage-style art. So now as an adult I am gluing things onto things again.

NEA: What was your journey to becoming an artist?

YOUNG: My first experience was making things with construction paper. But it took me until after I succeeded as an actor to get back into physical visual art-making. But my experience as an artist or a creative person was, most of my life, as an actor and performer. My first experiences were through being a kid in plays at the community theater or musicals [and] school plays. When I was very little, in the early 1980s, there were two movies that came out that I never could forget and both movies have prototypical characters in them that I’ve modeled myself, for better or worse, after as an artist and a performer my whole life. Those movies were Tootsie, with Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie, and Amadeus, with Tom Hulce as Amadeus. Anyone who knows those movies well knows that is a huge blessing but also a very huge curse to identify with those two characters throughout a life. So those two movies really gave me a very strong, passionate desire to be an artist, or involved in the arts, to be a creative person… When I ended up at college, at Brown University, I decided to really focus on [acting] and graduated out of the theater program at Brown.

Click HERE to read the entire interview.

1 Comment »

  1. Hi John,
    The interview is great. You are such a talented and wonderful young man. As you know I met you on October 11, 2005 during previews of Jersey Boys at the August Wilson Theater and have seen you flourish in so many ways.When I met you in 2005 I knew then that you were so special and it is so exciting for me to see how you and your career have flourished.
    Your interest in the arts is such a wonderful part of your life.
    I will be coming to “Jersey Boys” to see you before the end of June. You are the best “Frankie” and I just love watching you in the role.I will miss you when you end your time in Jersey Boys but I know there will be new things in the future to look forward to, that you will be involved in.
    See you soon,
    XOXOXO
    Viv

    Comment by viv — May 29, 2013 @ 6:53 am

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