Chuck Dransfield Celebrity Artist & Medium: Lucille Ball
hey everyone it's me whimsy and i've got uh hello hi really amazing person here uh my friend chuck and amazing artist and trans medium chuck dransfield is here again to answer our questions about what it is like to be in the heart and soul of another person as an artist but specifically you've done a lot of work uh for people who don't know uh chuck is a professional artist you live in hollywood los angeles yes and you've been painting celebrities for quite a while now haven't you uh probably since i was a child yeah in fact uh the very first drawing i ever did in my life my first portrait was lucille ball when i was three years old this stick figure with orange curly hair with the crayon my sister had that drawing for many years and now she can't find it i keep telling her please locate it because i would love to frame that and put it up with all my that's probably the earliest record of me doing a celebrity portrait now today because you you know i hope you'll keep coming back but today i just was so curious uh if you could talk a little bit about developing the relation you have a very special relationship with all of the people you paint you connect with them and really deep ways can you talk about your relationship at all with uh lucille ball why is a really young child do you think you were attracted oh a particular actor that's one of the people i can't remember a time in my life where i wasn't attracted to her uh my sister said my big sister she's 14 years older than i am she said when i was a little boy like two three years old i used to go up to the television set when lucy would be on and i would just almost want to hug the tv the tv screen and i i know for myself lucy was like a mother figure to me my own relationship with my birth mother was rather complicated i won't go into it here it's forgiven but nonetheless it was a complex relationship i wasn't really getting the nurturement i needed from her and lucy was bigger than life and i i guess she just made me happy she made me feel good i felt so safe and protected when i was in lucy's presence so it started at a very early age where she became like a mother figure to me you know i mean i say that with the awareness you know she was on a television screen you know i don't but that's how it felt to me as a child and i think that got rooted deeply into me early on wow and so you probably spent a lot of time uh watching her career over the years is that right oh yeah oh yes i became a big i love lucy fan early on i'd watch the lucy i grew up in the early 60s so it was the lucy show at night and it was i love lucy on during the daytime so that was my double dose i just knew i loved her and she made me laugh so hard she made me feel so good um so yes lifelong fan i even got to see her work once i never got to meet lucy but in 1986 she attempted a revival of her sitcom it didn't do well it only lasted about eight episodes unfortunately but i got to sit in the audience so i got to sit in the audience and watch the great lucille ball work in front of the cameras and i consider that a milestone in my life i could not have been more thrilled it could have meant more to me wow how's that now do you remember where where you were when you heard that she had passed over that she had passed on yes i do as a matter of fact well i knew that she had been ill you know she had been in cedar sinai for the week she had a uh i believe a partial heart transplant oh wow yeah it was very serious but her aorta uh very early in the morning like five in the morning and i was at work in beverly hills at the time and it was maybe 9 30 10 o'clock someone came in and said did you hear that lucy died no because i we were all holding out that she was going to recover you know she you know that everything looked good until that morning when her aorta ruptured it was just her time to go and i i i people took it like a death in the family i saw people all around beverly hills walking on the sidewalks looking sad forlorn and and then later that day i talked to other people i had people calling me because they knew what she meant to me i actually had friends from the east coast and all around the valley calling me are you okay are you okay like i had lost a family member that's what it did feel like it was like losing a family member i was i was very sad but i guess this this cuts into what we were going to talk about about her spirit being with me of course that's uh for a lot of people don't know that you are actually a medium that you are trans medium and that you communicate with people who have passed on and so i guess like that's what i want to ask about is when did she actually start communicating with you did you well that's how what happened when you actually it was very quick oh it was very quick you see in those days she died in 1989 in those days i didn't think of myself as being a trans medium i just knew that i would pick up on things i was sensitive uh i said this in the last interview it's like when you know you have your back turned and you know a person is in the room you know their energy i i can't tangibly explain it except three days after her death i knew she was with me i just knew it my cat's getting in the frame here i just knew she was in the room and i could feel her energy it was very comforting and it was like i'm okay it's okay don't be sad it's okay i just transitioned it's all right but she came to me so fast and i couldn't even understand it i thought well maybe this is just my imagination but it just felt so solid and real and then she came to me in a dream that night and just started chatting with me i don't remember the specifics of the conversation other than it was engaging and warm and friendly and loving and then i started having dreams almost every night for a while where she would come to me and again just chat with me and like she wanted to get to know me better and she more or less implied like she had known me like in in a in past lives we had known each other already so she knew where to find me and she just sought me out i maybe she was magnetized to the energy because i was in so much grief and i was thinking about her so much and other people who do this will say that when you're in that state it's like making a phone call like you're you're dialing out to the universe and spirits will pick up on that whatever it was she was magnetized and came to me within three days um it became more involved as time went on because you know this was over 30 years ago right i don't want to i don't know if you have other questions i don't know if i should go on to some other things yeah like how did your because it i mean this the wild thing about your relationship with lucille ball is that it you actually begin your relationship with her after she passes on that is interesting and i'll tell you another thing that's interesting after she passed away then i started meeting a lot of her friends a lot of her co-workers uh i met her son i met her daughter met her uh her husband uh it was like everybody started coming out of the woodworks it wasn't when she was alive it was after she died so i don't know if it was lucy guiding people to me coincidental but i suddenly started to meet people who were on i love lucy i met uh people who worked for her when she was their boss relatives close friends where she just felt like part of my family so it's kind of like she brought you into her inner circle afterwards like you know what chuck you're i think maybe so you and said you know i'm gonna connect you with my friends this almost sounds like well one of the people i was connected with was a man named bart andrews he uh wrote the i love lucy book that's what it's called the i love lucy book and it was a big bestseller i think it had something like 26 printings just an iconic book that was a like a perennial in the bookstores it was around 1991 i met him and we became very close very close and he introduced me to a lot of the i love lucy people as well but years i'm jumping ahead here but years later he and i collaborated on a book about i love lucy and lucille ball it never got published because of a lot of politics for a variety of reasons it didn't get published but i did have the experience of intimately researching lucille ball's life where i used to joke that i was eating sleeping and breathing i love lucy i was getting my doctorate in tessie lou and there was this one night i was writing about her step-grandmother when she was a little girl the story was that her mother had to leave her with the step-grandmother for a while while she went off to work in another city and i had read these biographical accounts of how strict the grandmother was it was almost like something out of a dickens novel like she would make lucy wash dishes over and over and over until they were perfect she'd make lucy sweep the floor over and over until it was perfect and i thought that was rather abusive psychologically abusive if nothing else and i was writing about it my computer died just you know just went out completely and i lost all my work for the night and i was so upset about it and i thought okay i can't do anything about it i went to bed well remember that dream i talked about james dean last week well lucy came to me in a dream and she was mad well i should say she was very stern she but she was like look buster i don't like what you wrote about my grandmother i don't like that i'm the one who made your computer crash and then she yeah yeah and i remember those blue eyes right up to my eyes and she was blazing because lucy was a very forceful person you know she was a task master uh she said what she felt and she was looking me in the eyes blazing saying look buddy i don't like what you wrote now you gotta understand something i loved my step-grandmother and she loved me and the fact that she made me do things over and over until they were perfect told me that she loved me and that established my own worth ethic because if you know anything about lucy she did that on i love lucy on her show she made people do things over and over until they were perfect and then lucy said to me everybody said i was a [ __ ] everybody said i was a monster because i was tough with people and i made people do things over and over and it was because i loved them and i cared about them just like my grandmother loved me she taught me that's what love was and the dream was so intense i you know those dreams where you wake up you're shaking that that's the kind of dream was like lightning going through me and the next day i was walking through pasadena thinking about that dream and i realized that lucy had just given me a big piece of the puzzle to understanding her because i had interviewed people half the people were telling me what an angel she was and how wonderful and how loving i had another half tell me oh she was a [ __ ] oh she was horrible oh she was so tough and mean and awful i realized that's what lucy was telling me she was misunderstood because she was just showing her love and care for people and people thought she was being a [ __ ] because she did it but she was a perfectionist you watch i love lucy she wanted them to be their best and she was willing to put time and effort into making sure yes she was because you watch i love lucy every person right down to the person who has one line is perfect and that's because lucy worked people until they were perfect and she learned part of that i believe from her step grandmother so she gave me that tool and you know here's something that's interesting i was in pasadena and i was still like did i just imagine this and i just make this up you know i said lucy if this was real i want you to give me a sign i swear this is true i turn my head and in the store window is a great big i love lucy pillow right to that when i said lucy give me a sign that that was you in the dream i knew it was real oh wow yeah and we just saw your familiar uh walking behind you your cat sasha yes yes yes this is tasha my son yeah sasha is a beautiful kitten now there's a transition that starts to happen with you the medium and the artist and lucy where it takes on a new dimension uh and she almost becomes like a spirit guide to you can you talk very much she takes you up under her wing and she starts to literally she kind of does the same thing to you doesn't she she's the tax master that gets you up and yes she does she's the type of person what are you doing sitting around on your butt come on come on get to work get to her you know show i hear that i hear her nudging me if i'm getting a little lazy or the other extreme is sometimes she reminds me you know you need to relax you need to slow down and that's the very nurturing motherly side of her which i had other people tell me she was like this was a woman who was the head of a studio and she would see a security guard in a booth at midnight when she was leaving in a car she'd turn a car around go back into a prop room and get a blanket and bring it back to the guard she was very motherly like that so i get a lot of that from her where she's tough with me but she's also nurturing very comforting um i just i just feel her around me a lot more so than any other spirit and i don't want to make any audacious claims this is just what my experience is um wow so i want to talk now about the actual art you've done of lucy a little bit of that when you are i love that one i love the one you did for me i said make me something romantic and then you did a beautiful painting of all of her with her husband oh i love that one too my favorite husband you always felt that that was truly her soul mate uh desi oh yes yes you know what's interesting um his name was desidario her both names translate to mean the same thing desire hmm yeah they were they were soul mates they never got over each other uh they remained very close friends desi once said in an interview that they spoke three times a week on the phone in fact lucy even took care of him for a while in her guest house when he was dying of cancer and she never got over him i've talked to many people who knew them who said that you know she loved her husband gary of course but desi was the great love i think it was just a case of it was too intense too intense for both of them it was a case of you can't live with someone but you can't live without them either like after they both divorced both of them became seriously ill lucy came close to dying from pneumonia desi almost died from uh serious colitis wow yeah they were both very sick i think their physical bodies just could not handle the emotional impact of what had happened lucy even said we were never the same emotionally or physically after that divorce wow in fact do you know that lucy was the last person does he ever talk to uh that daughter lucia ernest was taking care of him and she called her mother and said uh mom i think you better talk to him i don't this doesn't look good he hasn't eaten in three days he's very weak he can barely hold his head up and she said let me hold the phone to his ear and lucille said yes of course of course and lucy has told this story lucy arnett has told this story because she could overhear she just heard her mother going dizzy i love you i love you i love you i love you i love you she kept saying it over and over putting emphasis on each i love you and then desi he was very weak but he said i love you too and then he closed his eyes and went into a coma those were the last words he ever spoke it was to lucy and the last thing i ever heard was lucy's voice telling him she loved it oh god that's so i know that incredible now here's the kicker the day turned out to be what would have been their 46th wedding anniversary how beautiful 46th wedding anniversary you know and it was just total coincidence oh that was a fun conversation that no that's soulmate love and also lucianez told the story uh her mother came down three weeks earlier to visit desi and he was of course very frail he was bald from chemotherapy and he didn't want to be seen like that and lucille had to just kind of knock on the door please hi let me let me in he finally let her in they sat on the edge of the bed and the daughter daughter lucy arnez brought in a stack of vhs videotapes of i love lucy and that's how they spent their very last afternoon watching i love lucy together sitting on the edge of the bed because i know it's i know i get emotional thinking about it too well we all love them yeah you know that lucy uh two or three months before she died there was a gallup poll taken um naming people were to name who's the most beloved person in the world the most beloved woman in the world mother teresa was first princess diana was second number three was lucille ball of course now i have a question when yes i love your baby you're freezing hopefully the film will be okay when we uh download this but when you're painting her i know as a medium that you are connecting we call it heart centered remote viewing that the actual technical term when you're bonding heart to heart with someone whether they're alive or they've passed over when you have that heart-to-heart connection with someone who's passed over i know of course you can do it with lucy but you've also painted people that are unknown friends and family oh my goodness can you talk about what it feels i just need to know because i'm curious as a medium it just feels to me like you open your heart to the person who's passed over very similar to hcrv and then do they lead you how to paint them do they tell you what they want like how does media okay i was going to say that no two situations are the same so the stories are going to vary but i can give you an example about a year ago i got this idea to do a series of portraits of 1930 starlets women who came to hollywood with talent and beauty but never made it they never made it to the league of greta garbo or betty davis or hepburn i thought that would be interesting to do a series of portraits of these shall we say forgotten women and as i started doing those i could feel their presence i can't help this whenever i do a portrait i may have i don't know if i mentioned this before but i always focus on eyes first and foremost because the eyes tell you everything you would ever want to know about a person that's their soul you see if i gave you a my brother passed a wave and when he was young he died when he was 21. if i commissioned you to paint i mean because i've been trying to connect with who if i were to give you a picture my brother would you be able to paint him and then maybe give a message i do believe so yes because i almost invariably always do receive a message i you can't because you see i spend several hours on a portrait i've never been too good at just doing quick sketches i put a lot of detail into what i do so a typical portrait can be anywhere from five to fifteen hours so that's a lot of time being in their energy looking into their eyes and i can't help it whenever i look at a photo i can always see the story the backstory of that person i sense it but invariably messages do start coming in such as the starlets i was working on i this may sound a little corny to say but consistently i would hear these women saying oh thank you for remembering me thank you for making me beautiful and young again thank you for bringing me back to life again like i get that gratitude from them because these were women who were actresses you know if you know anything about actors they're different joey people they're very representational they're very look at me so i got that sense that they were enjoying this process and they felt privileged by it that's just what i got from them but messages are going to differ from each person um i just recently did a portrait of a mother and her young child that was from a photo of 30 years ago the mother is now deceased and i could just hear her saying i want my son to know it's okay it's okay it's okay i'm in a good place right now it's okay i i love him maybe that sounds very generalized but that's what i was hearing as i was doing the portrait and i was focusing on her eyes and her little boy um i've done portraits of my mother that have been enormously healing because that's a chance to be in her energy again for a while and communicate and to release and to even forgive i also take joy in that and i think she takes joy because my mother was a very beautiful woman in her youth so i love you i love to do it looked like an actress his mother was he looked like a guard yes she did so i loved to do portraits of her when she was young beautiful because i can see she was happy i really sensed that was the one time in her life she was really and she was really happy she was on top of her situation she was optimistic because when i knew my mother that optimus long gone she was going to tear up the town i have a question for you yes true for you as a medium and is that what i feel you do like what you did for me when i went through my divorce and i was grieving and then you gave me the lucille ball and there's that really meant a lot to me and i'm feeling broken down and i'm like i'm old and i'm unlucky i mean i really went through a rough time but i would look at that painting and see their love and it just really got me through through it a lot but i just wanted to also say that i feel that in a way spiritually what you're doing in your paintings is you're healing the past for people that that person has passed on that person's gone and it's too late a person may feel like it's too late for me to resolve my issue with this individual and what i think you really have done at least for me just through your art is you bring these people back to life and you bring their messages back and in a way you kind of heal the past and it helps us reframe the past can you speak to that at all well yeah i was just going to say i don't consciously set out to do that always well sometimes most of the part i just set out to do a really good portrait but in doing a good piece of art you have to get out of your head you know in your head you have all of your technique your schooling your education your background what you've learned from making years of mistakes but ultimately you have to get out of your head and open your heart center up that's the only way i know to work and so when i open my heart center up all this just naturally starts flowing through me you're doing yeah but i mean you really are a heart-centered remote viewer but you're what you're doing with your gift is your is the art and that's the thing that i have no artistic talent that's why i just love what you do but i'm sorry to interrupt you but i was gonna say that it's not like i consciously go okay i'm gonna channel this and i'm gonna encode this into the piece no it just naturally happens uh the energy of that person goes into my work it goes into the eyes it goes into the expression and i say this because other people have told me this when they receive the art they feel it it's like oh my god you brought that person back to life yeah that's what i felt i was just trying to do my sincerest best you know i i come from a place that no ego if you know me i'm very humble about my art but i i come from a place of love and just whatever comes out comes out it's like when i was doing the james dean art for his hometown and i told you i was feeling james dean's energy i said jimmy i don't know what you want to say to the people in this art i'm just going to be your vessel let it go into the art let it encode into the art i'm just going to let it flow through me well that's what happens when i'm doing portraits it flows through me and it comes on there it's something bigger than me much bigger than me i'm just a vessel i think about mother teresa what she said about i'm just a pencil in god's hands uh i'm a pencil and a paintbrush yeah a colored pencil i'm just a vessel all right i have a couple questions from fans uh you are getting a fan group first off they want to know if you plan on having a youtube channel because they want to support you that's in the works uh i've got to be honest i am very feeble-minded when it comes to social media and technology and i'm at the mercy of a lot of good people who are helping me to do this i'm trying to learn all the nuts and bolts of it finally mastered instagram finally have a website but i do need to do a youtube channel eventually that's going to happen so if people want you to do a spirit painting like say or a family member or something like that how would they go about that well uh they can contact me on my website very easy www.chuckdransfield.com you know i'm sure you're going to give the information also all my contact info is on there so it's just simple as firing me an email and can you paint from a photograph say somebody has a picture of themselves with their husband and they don't the relationship is resolved you could look at the picture yes in fact that's my preferred method to working because i tend to work slowly methodically sometimes it takes me several hours so i am more comfortable with the photograph than a live model though i've done that of course but i find with a photograph everything i need is there i can read the energy and the the photo is like a catalyst anyway because once i start drawing and i'm focusing my energy i've opened my heart it comes in it starts coming in now it comes in different ways uh sometimes it's just a very simple message like what i said about mothers just saying i want to tell my son i'm okay everything is fine i love him it's that's simple occasionally it will be something a little more profound sometimes it's something intangible that i can't really put into words it's more of feeling but i try my best to put that feeling into the artwork and i like to believe that the recipient of the art may be the same thing as me where they're not going to get it in their conscious mind but they're going to feel it we'll feel that we all know what that's like when we've gone to an art museum or we see a great movie a play a piece of literature where we feel it we feel the energy it's it it goes beyond the intangible the tangible it goes beyond that and to me that's always what genius is you know whether you're an actor a writer a musician a dancer it's those artists who go beyond the human realm they're tapping into something that you're channeling that you can't define and how and you charge by the the amount of time you put into the painting is that yes i do i do um i normally it it's going to depend on the medium i'm using i'm versed in a number of mediums but if it were something very detailed well like for example the lucy this is a technique of watercolor and colored pencil and it involves many many layers of color it's not unusual for me to put as many as 60 layers of color down so a drawing like this would have about 15 hours in it so something like this it's very complex i would have to maybe charge a little more uh a drawing like that i would say on average about 350 dollars on average but i'm willing to work with a person you know if i i see that that's out of their price range let's talk let's talk what could you fairly give me i would be res receptive to hearing that maybe i could even work in something that would be a simpler style like maybe something in pencil or charcoal or line drawing so but i'm i try to be flexible with people because i i one of my great joys is making my art accessible to others i i love when people who normally can't have original art can have it because i've made it available to them but i do take joy in that and and i do see it as gratitude to the universe for giving me the gift i think it's very important to give as much as we can where we can wow so much fun i you know the next time you come i wanna i mean like you have done so many paintings and uh you've you've channeled so many amazing people um so you'll come back again of course of course you're well and i just want to say thank you to everyone the last interview there were so many warm loving responses you know messages for me you've been after me forever and ever to do an interview i finally said okay let's do it and i it was like coming out of the closet with what i do and i thought it was a lot of messages you know well i don't want to see you know people's like well you're not or you're come on you're making this up or whatever no everybody was very supportive well i think you've proven it because you've you've checked your own stuff you know i think any kind of a heart centered remote viewer or anybody who connects with spirit we will check our work we will go back and find out is did this happen or they'll give us a private little tidbit or something and so yeah i think you've done that many times all right i have a couple more just in terms of logistics there have been a few people that want to buy the lucy paintings they want to buy the other paintings had about 10 12 people ask i would say go to chuck now have a spirit message you need uh or just a loved one who's passed over their art this is definitely the art you've come this is definitely something i can do for you the best and thank you and many of the pieces are available as signed pieces signed and numbered limited edition pieces so just ask me you know it's a way if you can't afford a piece of original art i can make prints a lot more affordable i try to be accessible in every way but there are cases such as with lucille ball where there are legalities and i have to observe that that's why i say ask me about the individual piece well thank you chuck and again if anybody wants to find out more about chuck's amazing uh career and art you can go to chuck dransfield.com all right thanks for watching everyone thank you yeah i love you love you too and we'll see you next time peace out see you next time goodbye Note: The representation of Lucille Ball for commercial use is prohibited. Chuck Dransfield simply loves Lucille Ball and has painted her as a tribute to her work.
2021-12-08 21:20
