Category: art

Painting, 2/10/09

Posted on by Dale

One of my Lichtenbergian goals for this year was to begin painting again. My short term goals are a) to explore surface, i.e., abstraction; and b) to do a series of small paintings of a coffee mug.

This was my first effort, from last week sometime. I just wanted to whack one out, to see if I could actually pay attention to what I was seeing.

I chose a coffee mug because of its basic cylindrical shape and lack of surface features. My goal is to learn to observe and to replicate that observation, of shape, shadow, and reflection, and not to get bogged down in textures. Even with the no-features of the mug, I will have enough to be going on with, trust me.

So anyway, this was the first, get-it-out-there object, and it’s not a failure. I got the shadows pretty well, and for a quickie (it took me less than three minutes for the whole thing) it’s not bad in a Museum of Bad Art kind of way.

The problem, my problem, is the handle. I spent part of yesterday afternoon’s voir dire session trying to figure out the topology of a handle. It’s not hard, is it, just a torus intersected by the cylinder. But make that torus of highly glazed, white ceramic, and it’s a little bit tougher to see. There are no edges to speak of, and the actual shape is confounded with shadows and highlights.

That kind of twisty, ribbony kind of shape is the kind of thing our left brains love to assume they “know” what it looks like, and you have to force the left brain to shut up and let the right brain actually observe what’s there. My left brain “knows” that if I draw two ovals offset and connect them (like we used to do in elementary school with two squares to draw a cube, what, you didn’t do that?), it should produce a handle, but the results so far have not been satisfactory for my for-the-moment-semi-photorealistic purposes.

So I have a couple of left-brained plans to work on that. One is to print out a photo of the thing and just trace the shape, reduce it to lines.

It also occurred to me this morning that if I had a mug whose handle was striped, it would help define those fuzzy edges. Then it occurred to me that I could do that myself, and so I did, striping the “edges” of the handle.

Now I can see more clearly where the weird shift is in the loop.

So there’s my project for the next few days, painting-wise.

Creating

Posted on by Dale

I worked for an hour and a half this morning with some music, and despite my best efforts to piddle with fragments, no pressure, I ended up solving a couple of problems with the first movement of the Symphony. Nothing to share yet, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. Short version: the main motif has been reimagined as an opening fanfare/intro, and what used to be the B theme is now the A theme, since it opened with the same notes.

And as I am typing this, it occurs to me that a further part of a solution to the thematic material is to re-declare the key of the thing. I’ve been thinking of it as in G major, but it might suit my purposes better to have it in C major, if my purposes are defined as maintaining the actual notes of the main motif (hereafter known as the Motif) as the opening of the theme.

There are a couple of reasons I don’t want to do this. One is the fourth movement, which is in G. Yes, I know, it’s a disaster and I might as well go rewrite it in C. (It actually opens in C minor, so the transition to C major would actually be easier.)

Another reason is that everyone’s first symphony is in C major. And almost no one writes in G major. Actually, almost no one writes in anything major these days, because it just sounds so damned cheerful and we all know the music can’t be serious if it’s cheerful. At any rate, I’m unreasonably stubborn about this. But something tells me I’m going to take the easy way out.

Yesterday, we went to the High Museum to see the First Emperor exhibit. Go, if you have the opportunity. It’s truly magnificent. There’s something awe-inspiring about the whole thing: the artistry that the culture brought to everything it touched, the craftsmanship, and above all, the incredible hubris of the project. The emperor in question, having united the Warring States under Qin, began immediately to construct this enormous tomb from which he could continue his glorious and blessed reign after death. It’s like 27 square miles of buried stuff: larger-than-life-size soldiers, yes, but also musicians, animals, acrobats, carts, banquets, temples, palaces–it’s literally an entire city for the emperor’s eternal use. (The half-size cart, which surprised me, because everything else was larger than life, was actually positioned next to a ramp, so the emperor could actually be driven up and out to travel around his domain.)

Equally impressive, though, were the two exhibits in the lower level, one of the sculptures of Ulysses Davis, and the other of works on paper from the folk art collection.

Ulysses Davis was an barber in Savannah, black, who carved amazing sculptures. Especially interesting to me was the way that he developed from very literal carvings and bas-reliefs to highly symbolic and imaginative pieces. He made a creative journey that trained artists can only pray for. He did it through the work, of course, although he did apparently study books on African art on his own. Follow the work, follow the work.

The drawings from the folk art collection is all “outsider” stuff, and like most of the genre is hallucinogenic in the extreme. I’ve never read of any of these artists ingesting entheogenic substances, yet there they are, acid trips and mushroom journeys, all on paper.

Many were schizophrenic and that’s usually credited with their bizarre visions, but having read Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, my question is whether they are actually perceiving the world visually in ways that the rest of us have to take drugs to see.

The complexity of their visions is astounding. Can any trained artist achieve this? Part of the awful beauty of the work is the un-academic clumsiness, which the artists apparently recognized at some level because there is always a compensation in the balance of the composition to make up for the lack of draftsmanship, perspective, etc.

The very existence of the works is one proof of the evolutionary nature of artistic creativity. Two drawings struck me in this regard. I don’t remember anything about the artist other than his being male. They were two large pieces of drawing paper, and the drawings were pencil. There were straight lines drawn in regular graphite, with tiny little Klee-like, or perhaps Tanguy-like, blodgets extending from either side of the lines. These blodgets were all red or blue. Very nervous, frantic pieces, and their titles were like “Demon House,” very ominous.

It occured to me as I examined the drawings that he must have used one of those double-ended pencils that have red lead on one end and blue on the other. Remember those? Do they even make them any more? I remember thinking how neat they were when I used to see them in Woolworth’s over in the old Eastgate shopping center (where the Justice Center is now), and I know I owned at least one in my childhood.

Without knowing anything about the artist, I am imagining that he created these drawings with the only materials available to him. He had no choice about any of it: the paper, the medium, even whether or not to draw, or indeed what to draw. He had to do what he had to do. (Lacunans, refer to my piece from last week.)

The power of all the works in this exhibit was overwhelming to me, for some reason. As I start/continue my sketching/painting, I would love to produce something like these: simple, complex, untrained, chthonic in its source. The irony is that with my music, my lack of training is a real stumbling block, yet with my art, what little training I have will derail my ambitions.

New Year’s Day

Posted on by Dale

I have only one resolution of any import, and I’ll get to that in a moment. In the meantime, I was very unsocial last night, turning down a couple of very kind invitations and issuing none of my own. This is what I did while waiting for the New Year:

One of my Lichtenbergian goals last year, and the only one repeated for this year, is to start painting again. I say again as if my cessation were a recent event, but it has been years since I used any of my art supplies. And the last time I did “art,” rather than costume or set designs, has to be nearly 30 years ago.

So I dragged out all my stuff and got to work. I have in mind for the coming year a couple of series, and I’m thinking about just painting a plain coffee mug over and over until I have control of the media again. For last night, I decided just to play with color and brush and surface, just to get back in my fingers how the stuff works. (My medium at the moment is gouache, a kind of thick tempera, also known as designer’s colors.) I also had another agenda, but that remains secret for the moment.

It’s interesting to me how much some of the stuff looks like what I was producing in high school. This is not a good thing, of course, but maybe I can catch up with the rest of my life as I go along. It was fun to do, and I have enough art supplies to last for a lot of exploration (vide infra).

It has not escaped my notice, either, how mutually incompatible my composing and my painting are, not only in time, but also in space. Both require me to cover a sizable surface, and in my case it’s the same surface: my drafting table. Oh well, let one be a distraction for the other, I say.

I normally do not bother with New Year’s resolutions. They have always implied that you spent at least part of the past year in some kind of existentialist bad faith, from which you awaken somewhere around Christmas and, in a fit of newfound self-awareness, make decisions about how you are going to change. More bad faith, as far as I’m concerned.

Still, a couple of days ago I decided to try an experiment, which we will call a resolution. I think I was getting dressed, and I began to pay attention to my shirts. Over the holidays, I’ve worn essentially t-shirts and henleys or sweaters, so all of my shirts are clean and hanging up. There’s an enormous number of them. I have, and I’m going to allow myself enough bad faith not to go count them, over 30. I can take a dozen shirts to the cleaners and not break a sweat about having something to wear to work for a week or even two, any season of the year.

Likewise, I have enough Christmas ties to start at Thanksgiving and wear one a day until school is out without repeating myself. And that’s just a subset of my total tie collection.

Books? Just the unread ones by my bed would probably carry me through the rest of the year. Working my way around the house, I could catalog for you the surplus materiel available to me in any area of my life.

So that’s when I decided to try an experiment: how long can I go without buying anything?

I don’t need anything, as evidenced by the very short tour of possessions above. By any standard on this planet, I am comfortable beyond the imagination of most of the six billion people who live here. I certainly have spent a great deal on the labyrinth, all of it on my credit card, and I need to exercise restraint in order to pay that off in a timely manner. And I think it will probably be salutary to force myself to confront every desire that would normally have me reaching for the 1-Click button at Amazon.

Clearly, I am talking about discretionary spending here. Yes, I will continue to buy groceries and pay my bills (which I ought to be doing right now instead of philosophizing here). I will maintain the car and the house, etc., etc., etc. But books, music, software, art supplies, clothing, all those fun things that encrust my life, and quite honestly I enjoy, I won’t be buying any.

My goal is to see if I can make it to June. Stay tuned.

So…

Posted on by Dale

The question arises, what have I been up to? I clearly have not been blogging.

Mostly that’s because I don’t have a lot to say. Actually, I might have a lot to say, but none of it is very coherent these days. Much tumbling through the brain, large galactical dust clouds, but no planets forming.

However, I can report on my latest acquisition(s).

First and foremost, I have bought a painting by Dianne Mize, my painting instructor from GHP in 1970. She and I have agreed never to mention how many years ago that was, and I’ll thank you to do the same.

Here’s the painting:

click to see Dianne’s original blog post

Dianne had sent me an invitation to the exhibit opening at the Tekakwitha Gallery in Helen, GA, but since it was November 1, the Saturday evening performance of Coriolanus at NCTC, I couldn’t go. When she sent an email saying the show had been held over until Christmas, I made plans to get there.

Ginny readily agreed to my idea of returning from Virginia via Helen so we could stop to see Dianne’s work. I had already decided that I would just pick one and charge it, so when Ginny offered to make me a Christmas present of whatever one I wanted, I accepted.

I also considered this painting:

click to see Dianne’s original blog post

It was a tough choice, obviously. I may have to have the cows later. I chose the landscape because of its subject matter. I love places like this. It reminds me of a couple of places from my life, and each of them was from a time of great happiness.

One is Snake Creek over on Parks Avenue. When I was a child, we would play there constantly, plashing in the water and running through the “woods” in that narrow strip that runs along the curve of the street. It was and is a beautiful green space.

Another is a park on the outskirts of Athens by the river. I didn’t get to go there a lot, but I remember one time, the spring of my junior year, when Kevin Reid, Cathy McQuaig, and I went for an afternoon picnic there. Kevin had become my closest friend after showing up that semester, he had dropped out of Griffin High School and just come on to UGA, and all three of us were close from working both in the costume shop and in Period Dance.

Kevin and I were a lot alike: young, precocious, serious, ferociously curious, intense readers. I know I was in love with him, and he with me, in the way young men are that verges on the physical. (Jobie, remember that piece I read out loud this summer? It was Kevin that gave my reading that passion.)

He’s dead now, of AIDS, back in the late 80s I think. I didn’t know this until last year when Ginny and I went to LA and had a reunion of a bunch of UGA theatre folk from that time. I had put together a video of all the Period Dance photos, and when we came to one of Kevin, that’s when someone told me of his death. It still hurts me, as I type this even, how I lost touch with him, and then lost him entirely.

As we sat by the river that afternoon in 1975, we knew we were enjoying a halcyon moment, and we even verbalized it. I think we knew that we would lose each other to Time, and we hugged our happiness to us even as the sun set.

That’s why I bought the landscape.

I like Dianne’s impressionistic style, her loose brushwork, and her sure sense of palette. I especially like her methods of working, and they are methods, which frustrates me when I am unable to develop similar methods for my own work in music.

However, I’m not going to whine. Let’s talk about what I am working on rather methodically, and that’s the labyrinth. I haven’t done anything since earlier in the week, of course, and now it’s raining, but I am beginning to see the endgame here.

I shall finish the curves on the pathway this week, working Tuesday and Thursday on that task. Tuesday afternoon, I order the topsoil, and with any luck will have that to play with this weekend. On Thursday, I will seek out stonecutters here in town, one of those granite countertop concerns over on the bypass, to see if they can cut the stones around the center in a more precise circular pattern. I also developed a fantasy today of checking out a four-foot piece of granite for the centerpiece. That wouldn’t be expensive at all, I’m sure.

With any kind of luck, I may have the labyrinth finished, if not this weekend, then the next. I will also be working then on coordinating the mise-en-scene of the entire backyard into something whole: columns, lighting, sculpture maybe? I don’t know. As Marc says, it seems I’m determined to become the Howard Finster of College Street.

Some random thoughts

Posted on by Dale

My plan is to begin working on music in a fairly serious manner tomorrow night; it will be the start of my fall push. You may remember how I have realized that I work better with a schedule, so I’m devoting Sunday mornings and Tuesday and Wednesday nights to composing.

What will I be working on? I got email today reminding me that the deadline for the Welcome Christmas Carol Competition is next Friday, so I think I’ll see if I can knock something out for that. I should do some work on A Day in the Moonlight, but Mike’s in Africa for a while, so it’s not as if he can check up on me.

The challenge this year is to set a carol for SATB chorus and a five-octave celesta, which apparently is a big deal. (Del Mar’s Anatomy of the Orchestra says that four octaves is in fact the norm.) This is the instrument that plays (and indeed was first heard) in “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy” from Nutcracker. It’s a very quiet instrument, played like a piano, unable to be heard above much of a mezzopiano.

Again, as I mentioned I think in May, finding the text is the hard thing. Maybe after I finish musing this post.

Last week, Diane Mize, my painting instructor from GHP so long ago (we have a mutual pact not to mention that number of years ever again), sent me an email from one of her favorite creative bloggers, Robert Genn, a painter. Like me, he recognizes that there are particular times of the day when he’s most apt to work spontaneously, but recently he came across an idea he shared in his biweekly letter (explained and subscribable here.)

The idea is to perform one more creative act before turning out the lights. Tiredness contributes in a way one does not expect. Casualness and the feeling of “something extra” make their mark. A lackadaisical twenty-minute afterthought becomes a creative bonus.

He talks about it being a way to use up extra paint, in his case. I’m wondering how I might do this. My creative times are in the evening anyway. I work best when I have specific times set aside, and I usually quit precisely at 9:00 unless I’m really burning through material. So an hour later, would there be “something extra,” or would it be just thoughts based on what I’ve already done? Again, I’d benefit more if I were able to jot down things I heard in my head in any kind of accurate way.

Genn makes it sound as if one is to return to one’s workspace, but “before turning out the lights” implies bedtime to me, especially since I work nearly up until that time anyway. Perhaps I could have some kind of bed-journal. This keeps sounding like yet another Moleskine notebook. Ah, well, if I must…

Yesterday, we went to the High Museum to see the Annie Leibovitz exhibit. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by an exhibit like this, not just through the sheer volume of great stuff that you have to assimilate before your legs give out, but also of the sheer greatness of the mind you are encountering.

Leibovitz was an enormous force in photography. Her celebrity portraits were witty without being gimmicky, and were often sumptuous. Her photodocumentary works were stark and powerful. Her “informal” photos, of family and such, were as carefully selected as her other work.

Much of her work stays with you, indeed, much of the exhibit one would have seen before when it was first published, but the portrait of Daniel Day Lewis especially intrigued me. Having such a handsome subject always helps, I’m sure, but I keep remembering the richness of his attire, the layers, the vest, the shirt, possibly a scarf or cravat, the greatcoat, all dark-colored and tumbling about him. He sat in near profile to us, his legs crossed elegantly away from us, and looking out from the dark background. It was somewhere between a dark Renaissance portrait and a Regency rake.

Of course, it is very hard not to regard the output of such a great mind as this as a rebuke, or at the very least, a challenge in several ways.

First, it seems to challenge you to respond to the art, to the mind; to know, to appreciate, to understand what the artist has accomplished and to embrace it, not only the polished result of a lifetime of seeing and doing, but the struggle of that seeing and doing in the result you see before you.

After looking at Daniel Day Lewis for some time, do I know him better? Of course not; that’s a fallacy of Vanity Fair readers everywhere. But I do know Annie Leibovitz better. I see her ability to see Lewis in terms that will reveal him to the viewers of this portrait. Despite her claim elsewhere in the exhibit not to be able to produce decent work in a studio, the Lewis portrait is a masterwork of sensuality and chiaoscuro.

This great work is of course a challenge to one’s own meagre doodlings. It’s a challenge to produce, to meet Leibovitz on her own terms, to explore and push your boundaries as she pushed hers, failure is not an option, even it it seems clear that it really is the only option. You want to play as well as she has.

::sigh::

Day 365

Posted on by Dale

Well, here we are. The end of the experiment. Was I able to be creative every single day for an entire year?

Short answer: of course not, if by creative we mean “producing something new.” Many was the day I had no time, nor the energy, nor the ideas even to commit failure to paper. I knew that going in, needless to say.

At one point in the year I know I expressed envy of those on the web who were doing similar kinds of projects, producing a drawing or watercolor or small oil or photograph every day. I don’t know that I would have overcome my reasons for not producing every day if I had been producing a concrete thing rather than music (my focus for the most part), but it seemed to me at the time that they had an advantage over me. (So why didn’t I just whip out a watercolor those days?)

Would I able to claim that I was creative every day if we don’t mean “producing something new”? Perhaps. As I read Out of Our Minds and skimmed back through some other books like Fearless Creating and Twyla Tharp’s Creative Habit, I was reminded of what I already knew going in, that creativity is not production. It is a process that must include plenty of incubation as well as consumption of material. However, I think I claimed those days.

Mostly what I have found is that I do best when I’m a) on a schedule; and b) on a deadline. If I set aside Sunday mornings and then two evenings a week to compose, then I actually do compose, or at least fail at it. And the days in between, I am thinking about the stuff I’m working on.

The schedule also means I have the time to get in the groove. It takes me about twenty minutes to warm up, so to speak, and to get ideas flowing out of my head. At least that’s the case with composing. Writing, I can do on the fly (witness my dog-walking lyrics) if I’ve set myself a framework. I can spew some music while walking, but it’s all guesswork, since I have not yet achieved my goal of being able to transcribe what’s in my head.

Having learned all of this, I think I’m able now to set up the conditions under which I will be most productive. I may be able to, in the future, modify those conditions, but for now, I know what works for me.

So what did I accomplish this year?

First and foremost, of course, was the completion of William Blake’s Inn. A project that has occupied me off and on for twenty-five years, I was on the last leg of the journey when I started this project: finishing Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way. It took me over a month to do that.

Next it was orchestrating the entire work. (I think I may have started orchestrating some of the pieces in order to distract from Milky Way.) This project is not quite finished, of course. I have not yet officially orchestrated The Man in the Marmalade Hat Arrives and Blake Tells the Tiger the Tale of the Tailor. They’re quasi-scored using various instrumental sounds in the piano score, but I don’t have actual orchestral scores for them yet. Unless someone in Newnan, GA, steps up to organize the production, my widget says we have 447 days until opening night, those two items will remain on the back burner.

At the same time, I started the “Highway 341” poem. I used that as a fallback item on days when I didn’t/couldn’t compose, but I haven’t worked on it since shortly before finishing Milky Way. I guess at that point the Inn took over. Well, it’s still a pretty good start, and I can return to it in the coming year. I would have to go back and do some deep thinking, of course, because I’ve gotten it to a point where I would actually have to start writing about the feelings that inspired it to begin with. And those were never very clear.

I also began, last August, noodling around on my symphony. Needless to say, I haven’t given that any thought since September either, but that is going to be my major project this fall and winter: Stephen Czarkowski has asked for it for next summer’s orchestra. Not exactly a commission, but hey, a request is as good as, right?

Also accomplished this year: Lacuna’s workshopping of the William Blake pieces. Very nice, lots of fun, and very very creative. I like working this way. I don’t like working without a permanent home: my van looked like one of those crazy people with all their prized possessions stacked inside. For months. But the give and take of the workshop sessions was invigorating. If the world premiere gets a green light, then I truly look forward to developing the entire scenario in this way.

I learned how to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) on websites, and that has been a very good thing.

I adumbrated and fleshed out the 100 Book Club at school. By the end of the year, we were up and running, but not at full speed. I’m looking forward to figuring out how to ramp that up this year. If it works, I will truly have something amazing to share with the educational community: a reading program that challenges our best readers to read thoughtfully and deeply and then to write about their experience.

I wrote The Invocation, which still stands up as valid. In a similar vein, we established the phase successive approximation as our mantra.

I began work on songs for A Day in the Moonlight, sketching out three so far. Once I get school started and am able to establish a schedule for myself, I could finish that by Christmas. Warning: I’m not orchestrating this baby. I’m just providing vocal/piano scores.

I rediscovered my Stars on Snow album of new age music and began to play with some of those files in Logic Express, Apple’s sound sequencer, which I began to learn how to use this summer.

I got inspired and wrote “Dance for double bass duo and marimba” which not only was greeted warmly by everyone concerned but which was premiered at the final GHP concert. I have a recording, but they were playing from the back of Whitehead Auditorium. I’m going to play around with it in Logic and see if I can beef it up a bit.

As a sidelight of “Dance” and the readthrough of Milky Way, I found myself suddenly in demand as a composer. Other than the Symphony, I have two requests for pieces. One of them is a serious request and I’ll work on it this fall. This is a very strange place for me to be in. I’m still sorting through that.

And I made a mug.

Something else got accomplished this year: a very small community of very smart readers helped me out. I’ve been checking out the posts, it’s taking me a very long time to write this, and I come across posts like this one. The post itself is very good, I think, but it’s the comments that blow me away: literate, thoughtful, witty. I like writing for you guys.

Next? I will finish the songs for Day in the Moonlight, and I will write my Symphony No. 1 in G major. That’s enough to be going on with. Of course, if a project coordinator materializes for William Blake’s Inn, then I’ll be back at work on that.

Will I keep blogging? I’m sure I will, although I may not blog every day. We’ll see. Don’t expect anything for a few days, anyway. My study is still unclean from GHP.

Checking back, I noticed that I started this project on August 1. Shouldn’t I have finished on July 31? How did I lose four days? Oh well. I knew that was bound to happen as well.

Day 364

Posted on by Dale

One day to go, but before we get serious, a response to yesterday’s post on copyright and the flux of the Commons, from Jeffrey R. (for “Raline,” we think) Bishop: listen to this. Some of us have way too much time on our hands. As I said yesterday, I’m thrilled that the planet is mashing up William Blake’s Inn. However, if he starts getting rich off of it, I’m going to sue his ass off for an unauthorized derivative work.

Tonight, Kevin McInturff called to chat about a couple of things, but one thing he asked me in particular: do I think that having blogged about my 365 days of creativity has made me more creative?

Yes, I do, actually. It made me more conscious of wasting time, and even though there were plenty of days tagged “not” (39 to be precise, 11% of the year), usually those were days when real life simply left me no time to do any work. The days I actually goofed off were pretty few.

Though my audience was small, you guys were an audience. I was highly aware that you read what I wrote and followed my ups and downs, and that made me determined at least to write every day, whether I had accomplished anything or not. Kevin suggests that those days were often more interesting than the ones where I gloated about my triumphs.

Will I continue doing this? Let’s see tomorrow.

The mug (Day 352/365)

Posted on by Dale

And here it is:

Not bad, although I think I should have used a green glaze for the interior. The size is just about right, so I was lucky there.

It does not approach the beauty of my 1987 mug, but it’s nonetheless nice. And of course it keeps me on schedule of one mug every twenty years.

I picked it up this morning in the ceramics studio; it had been unloaded last night, but I was a bit busy with a concert/world premiere/weeping.

As I write this, I’m stalling going down to Whitehead Auditorium to end it all. If I can stand it, I’ll write more about today later.