Honolulu Weekly

It’s standing-room-only at the Hawaiian Hut, where Kealoha’s free-form poetry slam takes place once a month. Solomon Enos sits in front of the stage focused on his digital tablet, occasionally nodding in agreement as the slammers air their grievances. A giant screen displays every stroke of his pen.

Performance art is like recess–’an opportunity to have fun’–in Enos’s syllabus of work. This evening he’s experimenting with animation. In three hours, he draws more than 150 frames. Every so often, he stops to evaluate his progress, makes a face and continues. With a click of the mouse, the abstract drawings come to life: a friendly, upside-down skull grows a tail and becomes an amoeba-like stingray that swells into a balloon and then shrinks to a navel orange.

Enos says he has a project for every hair on his head, whether it’s drawing, painting, sculpture or multimedia, and they’re all geared toward a monumental purpose. The prolific, 29-year-old artist means to redirect the course of human history.

‘All of our technology is designed to get up and go, but we forgot where we are going. We’ve empowered the function, and we’ve forgotten the purpose,’ he laments. ‘Are we driving our cars, or are our cars driving us? Are we spending money, or is money spending us?

‘In all indigenous cultures, knowledge is passed on through storytelling,’ he continues. ‘It is a way to remember our purpose.’ By recovering these stories, Enos aims to simultaneously preserve Hawaiian culture and design a new paradigm by which humans can exist.

Portrait of the artist

Framed by distinctive brows, dark sideburns and thick locks of black hair, Enos’s face is its own canvas of animated expressions. The charismatic Hawaiian-Chinese-Japanese-Polish-German-Russian-Portuguese boy from Makaha likes odd Scottish bands, British humor and Japan. Enos, with his lean frame, square jaw and breezy clothes that smack of unselfconscious T-shirt style, has an alluring ‘je ne sais quoi’ handsomeness. (He was cast on the reality show Blind Date–his episode will air in February.) But it’s his thoughtful disposition that really makes him attractive.

Enos grew up partly on Ka’ala Farm, the cultural learning center and anchor of West Side economic development that his father, Eric, founded in the early ’70s. Drug abusers, at-risk youth and other marginalized people have turned their lives around by learning to work Ka’ala’s land. The program’s success has given the Enos name–closely connected with other Leeward activists like the Dodge family–much weight.

But Eric is also an artist, and according to him and his wife, Shelly, Solomon has always been creative and generous. At age two, he was a Lego wiz. At three, his art tools were a hammer and nails. ‘We would walk around the house and find little pieces of wood nailed in odd angles all over the place,’ says Shelly.

Eric has a photograph of Solomon as a young boy standing in the lo’i. ‘He was looking at the earth, fascinated,’ says Eric. He and his wife started calling Solomon ‘Whuf,’ short for ‘What if,’ because he was always asking ‘whuf’ this and ‘whuf’ that.

Enos is one of four sons, along with older brother Kamuela and younger identical twins Kanoe and Kanohi. ‘My parents made space for us instead of forcing us,’ he says. ‘We grew up with room to run around and throw tomatoes at each other.’

Even as a kid, Enos was sensitive to the purpose of his art. When he was 10, he drew GI Joe shoot-em-ups. One day he was shown drawings by children in El Salvador and recognized that their pictures reflected their civil-war reality. ‘It looked like what I was doing–and I didn’t want to do it anymore.’

‘As soon as you pick up a weapon, you’ve lost your cause,’ says Enos. ‘What if we stopped blowing things up and started creating things instead?’

He is doing his part–his art is ubiquitous, on view in permanent displays at the Border’s Books and Music in Ward Centre, Native Books Hawai’i, Wai’anae’s Aloha ‘Æ’ina CafÈ and Makaha Marketplace. Besides some fundamental art classes he took at Kapi’olani Community College, Enos is self-taught. The images simply pour forth from his head and he executes them in pencil, watercolors, gouache, oils, electronically in styles that range from graphic and illustrative to abstract.

‘One of his classmates told me once, ‘Wow, your son is weird,” Eric Enos laughs, recalling that Solomon dyed his hair green in high school. ”Yeah, watch out,’ I said. ‘It’s contagious.”

‘Solomon’s both brilliant and weird. Being brilliant makes you weird, because not everyone’s brilliant,’ rationalizes Keoni Verity, owner of the Kapahulu ‘awa bar Hale Noa, where part of the space has just been converted to the Solomon Enos Gallery. He says it’s a perfect fit because ‘awa and Enos’s work both serve to raise awareness of how we relate to our environment and each other. ‘Solomon’s sense of self also includes us all. When you talk to Solomon, you feel considered for sure,’ says Verity.

‘Conversations revolve around me waving my hands around, jumping up and down, and talking about things that don’t exist–and then convincing people that I’m not crazy,’ admits Enos. His thoughts are usually punctuated with a conjunction, which he inflects upwardly between two emphatic pauses: ‘ÖsoÖ’ ‘ÖandÖ’ ‘ÖorÖ’–but optimist that he is, never ‘Öbut….’

Talking in metaphors, Enos occasionally interjects a pearl from the Dalai Lama or a reference to something he heard on NPR. Mention something positive, and he responds with ‘Maika’i!’ He is always reaching for a common denominator of understanding–a task he thinks is most easily accomplished through visual art.

Inside the artist’s studio

In Enos’s light-filled one-room Nu’uanu studio, art is everywhere–on the walls, on the windows, on easels, stacked in piles on his desk. His paint splatters cavort with those of former occupant Pegge Hopper on the wood floor. This is where Enos works and sleeps. Sometimes he forgets to eat, and he says he doesn’t dream. At the top of the stairs that lead into the hale is a peculiar cooler that condenses air into water–’Solomon literally drinks his own thoughts,’ says Daniel Anthony, Enos’ childhood friend, roommate and business partner.

Anthony, 27, who teaches lo’i farming at Halau Ku Mana charter school in Manoa (and is the grandson of activist James Anthony), brings home taro, cooks it and pounds it into poi, a staple of the pair’s bachelor diet. He’s an entrepreneur and a freestyle inventor (he has fashioned plastic bags into rope) and has become Enos’s manager, coordinating appointments, organizing projects, paying bills and filtering distractions.

The arrangement allows Enos to live in his head more than in his body. ‘There’s room for the creative process to find it’s own space,’ he says of people taking care of his daily modern-life survival tasks. Enos is a guy who just bought his first car a year ago. Before that, he rode his bike or walked. ‘When there’s too much structure, that organic thing ends up being handicapped.’

Enos knows how that works–he has stocked shoes at Famous Footwear, operated the register in the juniors’ section at Liberty House (’a great way to meet girls’), sprayed perfume samples (’another great way to meet girls’) and served coffee at Border’s Books & Music.

One friend calls him a ‘fartist’–a farmer-artist. In 2001, Enos helped found the Mala ‘Ai ‘Opio (MA’O) project, a sort of Ka’ala Farm for youth. The country boy also learned the inner workings of the State Legislature as an aide to state representatives Solomon Kaho’ohalahala and Maile Shimabukuro. As a clerk for the Committee on Energy and Environmental Protection, he grew keenly aware of the conservation issues Hawai’i faces.

Enos cites a factoid he heard on public radio that said the food you eat during a lifetime reconstitutes your body eight times–you really are what you eat. ‘Being Hawaiian is in our genes,’ he interprets, explaining that since life is inextricably connected to the land, taking care of the ‘aina means taking care of ourselves.

It’s about the work

Over the summer, Enos was a guest artist at Nanaikapono Elementary School as part of the Konishki ‘Visions of Hula’ program. The art created by the students under his direction will be exhibited in Paris in 2007. The versatile artist also designed the cover of Hoku award-winner Hapa’s latest CD. In September, Solomon spent six productive days at the historic Jean Charlot residence in Kahala, where ‘every aspect was carved by Charlot–even the trees outside were straight from his paintings.’ In October, the Bishop Museum Press will release Na Akua Hawai’i, a children’s picture book about Hawaiian gods that Enos illustrated. Last week, he opened his gallery in Hale Noa, where he can often be seen perched at a table, hunched over his laptop.

But this is only the surface. With the clarity of Ayn Rand’s visionary architect Howard Roark and the fervent compassion of a young Che Guevara, Enos has plans that are, well, revolutionary. It may sound airy-fairy in our cynical age, but he believes a healthy global consciousness is possible. His philosophy is based on the economy of wonder–a free commodity. Enos sees wonder in everything, and through his art, he reminds people that it’s there. Cognizant of the ability of images to transcend language and cultural differences, he emphasizes that this power engenders a serious responsibility.

‘If you can put it on canvas, it’s possible. Hitler was an artist,’ Enos says–adding under his breath, ‘Although not a very good one, so I think I have a better chance.’

Last month, Enos completed his most ambitious assignment yet, illustrating the epic of Hi’iakaikapoliopele, sister of the volcano goddess Pele. The project is the first comprehensive translation of the story in 100 years. Awaiaulu Publishing will release the book next spring in two editions: a $1,000 limited, leather-bound collector’s edition–some 500 pages in Hawaiian with English translation–and a $40 hardback version.

Hawaiian-language professor and award-winning songwriter Puakea Nogelmeier, who is translating the Hi’iaka story from a 1906 Hawaiian newspaper series, says the ancient stories contain lessons, such as rules of social protocol, that we can apply to our lives.

One of the epic’s crucial events–a lascivious game of spin the bottle between Hi’iaka and the prophetess Pele ‘ula–took place in Nu’uanu Valley, adjacent to the stream that gurgles outside Enos’s studio window.

‘Life has layers of truth just like the body has systems. Things that are unconnected change at the same time,’ says Enos.

Fantastic Hawai’i

As a Makaha Elementary student, Enos would look through the card catalog for books by H.P. Lovecraft, and his interest in the fantasy genre has only grown. Ten years ago, he had a ‘G’ tattooed in Elven script on his left upper arm; it stands for Gandalf. He has created his own Middle Earth–a place he calls Polyfantastica.

‘It is a desire to, by any degree, shift our current critically unsustainable and horribly violent state of co-existence on Earth by diverting mainstream media away from crippling societal icons of fear, greed, inadequacy and insecurity, and towards media that ask us as a collective human organism, ‘Wasn’t there something we were working on before we got distracted by organized religion and war and plastic?”

Polyfantastica encompasses 40,000 years that sweep through four eras based on the Hawaiian pantheon: K¸, god of war; Lono, god of healing and agriculture; Kanaloa, god of the ocean; and Kane, god of fresh water. The saga begins when the world is decimated by a deadly epidemic, and, thanks to its geographic isolation, Hawai’i is the only place that survives. Ten thousand years of war follow, only for the sake of teaching people that violence is futile.

A thousand centuries of peace then prevail as Hawaiians spread their knowledge across the earth in Enos’s story boards and writings. The landscape is covered with brilliant kukui trees, coconut groves, dry land forests and rich terraces of lo’i. Above is a city of kites. In the background is a robust orchestra of kapa beaters. In the years of Lono, poets and philosophers sow the seeds of love through art, music and theater.

Enos quantum leaps between the fabled Hawai’i that was, the physical reality that is and the utopia he imagines it could be. ‘Hawai’i is wearing somebody else’s clothing,’ he says, pointing out that 90 percent of the islands’ fauna are not indigenous. ‘We can update ‘Ha-wa-yee’ to ‘Ha-vai-ee.’ We need to add the ‘okina.’

As Polyfantastica expands to the edge of the solar system, humans evolve into shape-shifters with symbiotic superpowers and organic spaceships. Ultimately, this healthy society develops the consciousness to comprehend and navigate the galaxy.
Solomon is optimistic that humans can undergo such a transformation. He is developing characters that represent the necessary internal change: a warrior who wears his enemy’s head as a helmet to remind himself of his role, a nimble seed-gatherer, a comet-heroine who reconfigures the stars with her song.

‘Our stories can help guide us out of these troubled times,’ says Enos. ‘In ancient Hawai’i, every mountain, every valley had a story. It’s a profound secret–written on the surface of the Earth is the map to the galaxy.’

Enos intends to launch Polyfantastica in spring 2008 as a collective online story in a ‘quick and image-rich Wikipedia format with a Linux philosophy towards intellectual property.’

The site will allow contributors to add to a timeline with thousands of images and stories already in place. His plan merges the growing trends toward community empowerment and sustainability, and cultivates their expansion through the ultimate delivery vehicle, the Internet.

‘It’s like working with a big group of people to put together a 100,000-piece puzzle–and only I can see the picture,’ says Solomon. ‘I don’t know if it’s going to manifest during my lifetime, but I’d like to lay a foundation.’

Prominent futurist Kevin Kelly claims that the Web is ‘only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing.’ He portends that in the coming decade, ‘[The Web] will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our mindsÖwe will live inside this thingÖit will become our memory. Then it will become our identity.’ According to a 2004 Stanford study, the majority of people log on to the Internet to play games.

With Polyfantastica, Solomon creates a tangible catalyst that will engage people in contemplating a sustainable future–with Hawai’i as the model. The intricate characters are visually mesmerizing and the stories behind them are universally understood. Like Eric Enos said, watch out, the weirdness is contagious.

Farming art

‘A tree is very good at spreading its information,’ says Solomon. ‘One action becomes many actions. We must design as good a seed as possible to grow and take root wherever it lands.’

Enos and Anthony have formed a company, SEDA, to fertilize those trees by funding projects that meet their criteria–creative platforms for edutainment, ideas that promote sustainability, nutrient-rich media by artists, filmmakers and video-game creators who endeavor to build consensus. SEDA’s modus operandi is putting money to work by reinvesting it in the community. Someday they aim to buy a mall, knock it down and put up a public art center.

In the last five minutes of his life, Enos thinks perhaps he’ll be able to take a deep breath and say, ‘I did what I needed to do.’ For him, it’s not only a dream that there’ll be no more turning away. ‘Art has allowed me to find meaning in everything. I’ve found the magical seed; now I have to plant it.’

Visit the Solomon Enos Gallery at -Hale Noa (766 Kapahulu Ave, 735-4292, [www.halenoa.com]) or view his work online at [www.solomonenosgallery.com].