RICK DE YAMPERT / THE INSPIRATION SERIES
One crow.
Many possible
worlds.
Writing, music, art, and a creative life
that keeps finding another entrance.
By Rob Urban
A crow in the yard is enough to begin.
That is one of the pleasures of Rick de Yampert’s creative life. His work suggests how much possibility can be waiting in a familiar place, provided someone keeps looking and allows curiosity to take more than one form.
A bird can become a photograph, an artwork, a subject for a book. An interest in sound can become a performance with another musician. A conversation with an artist can become a story that helps a community see what is happening nearby.
I admire that range because the interests seem to remain in conversation. There is an appetite for the particular, and a willingness to follow it into another medium.
The result gives Central Florida more ways to encounter its own creative life.
THE WRITER
A place has voices
worth recording.
De Yampert’s own biography records twenty-three years as the arts and entertainment writer at the Daytona Beach News-Journal and an earlier period covering rock and hip-hop at the Tennessean in Nashville.
It lists interviews with creators including Kurt Vonnegut, Yoko Ono, Ray Manzarek and Janet Jackson.
What interests me in that history is the sustained work of asking people about what they make. An arts writer helps carry an encounter beyond the room where it happened.
Readers can learn the name of an artist, find a reason to hear a musician, or become curious about something they had not thought to seek out.
Over time, that work can give a place a more detailed cultural memory. The people who make it interesting have names, voices and specific things to say.
I value the attention involved in recording them.
A CLOSER READING
Many ways
to see the water.
A useful example is his 2016 story about AQUIFERious for Stetson Today.
De Yampert introduces artist Margaret Ross Tolbert through the experience of her paintings of Florida’s springs. He explains how her interest developed into an exhibition that brought painting together with underwater photography, video and maps.
The account names contributors including Jill Heinerth, Mark Long, Tom Morris, Eric Hutcheson and Georgia Shemitz.
I like the way the story gives readers several entrances. Someone might begin with the paintings, then become interested in the people photographing or mapping the water beneath the surface.
It is arts writing that expands the reader’s sense of a subject. The exhibition becomes a meeting of ways to see.
That feels especially apt for a writer whose own work moves among media. He can make room for the connections while keeping the individual makers visible.
THE ARTIST
Keep the gesture.
Change the world around it.
Discussing his crow art with FlaglerLive in 2019, de Yampert described beginning with photographs taken around his Palm Coast home.
He used digital processes and a painting program to transform the settings and colors, while retaining the birds’ photographed shapes. A tilted head or an arrangement of wings remained connected to the original encounter.
That decision is fascinating. The surroundings can become dreamlike while the bird keeps the particularity of its posture.
It gives the image two kinds of life: the moment noticed with a camera and the imaginative space constructed around it.
I appreciate the patience inside that process. A recurring subject can keep producing new possibilities because each encounter has a different gesture, angle or suggestion.
The crow remains recognizable, yet the artist gives us a reason to look again. An ordinary visitor to the yard acquires a place in a private mythology.
THE AUTHOR
The bird in the yard.
The bird in the story.
The publisher’s description of Crows and Ravens: Mystery, Myth, and Magic of Sacred Corvids, released in 2024, presents another approach to the same birds.
The book brings history, folklore, mythology and science into conversation with spiritual practices, meditations and exercises.
I find the movement between image and cultural story interesting. A bird can be present in a landscape and also in the stories people have used to understand their world.
Those are different kinds of encounter, each with its own questions. The book’s stated spiritual and folkloric focus gives readers a clear sense of the territory they are entering.
De Yampert’s continuing interest in corvids is what I admire here. A subject has remained fertile enough to invite another form, another scale of attention, another way for someone else to become curious.
THE DUO
Another person.
Another possible sound.
Phoenix Festivals’ 2025 profile of Wandering Spiral introduces the duo of de Yampert and Michelle Davidson.
Their instrument palette includes sitar, flutes, tongue drums, bass, singing bowls, percussion and synthesizer. The program also describes spoken-word performances accompanied by live music, alongside original work and arrangements of familiar songs.
Davidson is an artist, writer and musician in her own right, and that range belongs in the account of what they create together.
The pairing offers a different way to think about de Yampert’s curiosity. In a duo, the next sound can be a response to another person. A spoken passage can acquire a new setting through the music around it.
I am drawn to that possibility of exchange. Different instruments and creative histories become resources for making an experience neither person would make in quite the same way alone.
The thread I find across this work is a willingness to remain interested.
There is room for the artist being interviewed, the collaborator making the next sound, and the familiar bird that has not exhausted its possibilities.
That makes a creative life feel open. A medium becomes a way of approaching a subject; another medium may reveal something else.
De Yampert’s work gives me reasons to appreciate the cultural life close to home. It is made by people who notice things, pursue their interests, and find forms in which to share them.
A place becomes more interesting when those forms are available to us. We can read, listen, look, and leave with a little more curiosity than we brought.
Sources: de Yampert’s official biography; his AQUIFERious reporting for Stetson Today; his 2019 account of his art process in FlaglerLive; the publisher’s book description on Google Play; and Phoenix Festivals’ 2025 Wandering Spiral profile. Linked throughout. Discussion of the book concerns its published description. Interpretation by Rob Urban.