These are from Thursday.
These were deliberately “action” drawings, just getting the marks on the paper.
More later.
Category: Creativity
Creating something every day for 365 days
Random listening
One of the benefits of tripling my hard drive space is that I can now add more of my CD collection to my iTunes. The fact that I long ago exceeded my old iPod’s actual capacity frees me up to add whatever I like, and now I have room to do so.
So until I can get over to the dark and cluttered corner that is my old CD collection and go through to see what I’ve been missing, Handel’s Water Music springs to mind, I simply snatched up a stack of CDs from the floor and transferred them to my van. I figure I need to at least listen to them again before deciding I need them on tap.
I seem to have purchased a great deal of Havergal Brian. I know I got his huge “Gothic” Symphony back in the day, and it begins well. And I think I had a few of his smaller symphonies on LP even, from the estimable Music Heritage Society.
Who is he? He has his own website and his own Wikipedia page: a composer more respected than loved (although his Society seems fairly idolatrous), and whose music tends to exasperate more than clarify.
Anyway, this particular CD is of the “Fantastic Variations on an Old Rhyme” and the Symphonies No. 20 and 25. Performance is by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, conducted by Andrew Penny. So there.
His music is challenging to say the least. It’s nominally tonal, but without a diatonic center. Themes tend to be dark and noodling, and there is nothing like development, just constant exploration, never looking back. Mood swings are precipitous and neverending. Suddenly, we’ll swing round a corner and hit a major chord, and then just dissolve away into the next vista. Movements don’t end, they just stop.
This might be fascinating, but it’s not, at least not so far.
I do have to say that the “Fantastical Variations” is a lot of fun, but it’s easier to hear because it is weaving incredible elaborations on a very familiar tune. (I won’t say what. Ask me to play it for you next time you’re around the fire.) The man had a gift of invention and of orchestration, to be sure.
And one has to admire his doggedness. Almost none of his music was performed, and none of it very often. He lived to be 96, and eight of his 32 symphonies were written after he was 90. None of his symphonies were recorded until he was 95. It is history such as this that makes me wonder whether I should hang it up, like Charles Ives, or keep going, as poor Havergal Brian did.
Portraits
All right, I’m not promising a new self-portrait every day.
But here are two from Wednesday.
Pretty good portrait of what I hope I look like in another 25 years. Am I vain to think that I don’t really look this old? Several portraits like this seem to me to look more like my late grandmother than me.
Getting all sketchy. In terms of portraiture, I think you can tell it’s me, but it doesn’t look like me. This is my main goal in working on this: verisimilitude.
Uh oh
I came across this.
Should I? I should, shouldn’t I?
Fretting
My lack of productivity has reached shocking levels, so much so that my concern over it has invaded my brain like a worm and awakened me at 4:00 a.m.
I have not sketched, composed, or blogged in weeks, and I don’t see any such activity in my future, either. The other day I was seriously considering a moratorium on all such endeavors, just being honest about it and saying, “You know what? I don’t have it in me right now, and I’m hanging it up. See you guys later.”
But I can’t be honest about it. I have to delude myself into believing that I will make the time to sit down and work on something. Sometime.
Part of my problem is the old Leaf by Niggle dilemma. I have “responsibilities,” and those tend to multiply. For example, tonight I will have Lacuna (yes, that’s creative; but productive?). Tomorrow is the Newnan Crossing open house. Friday is sort of open and I may get some sketching done. Saturday I am hosting my fellow Lichtenbergians.
Monday is Masterworks. Tuesday… I need to meet about the Masterworks website and publicity. Wednesday, Lacuna. Thursday is open. Then it’s Labor Day weekend, and we’re wanting to travel.
Over on the Lichtenbergian website, we had an assignment to list the five rules for creativity. One of mine was “Defend your time.” I think I have failed at that.
Inertia, inertia, inertia.
Labyrinth, 8/23/09
Our problem, if you will recall, was that the channels I had cut into the omphalic bowl did not line up precisely with the bricks in the center of the labyrinth. On the advice of Andy, my ceramics guru, I bought a grinder and cut away the unnecessary portions of bowl. (Actually, Andy advised me to find someone with a grinder, including him; I just decided to buy one.)
Here’s the north channel, cut.
It is interesting to me that you can see the original layers of clay from its coil construction back in June. Anyway, I decided to seal the open clay with what was left of the marine epoxy.
Not very pretty, but this is underground so it doesn’t have to be. Here’s the bowl with both cuts made and epoxied:
And here’s the bowl once again in situ. Yes, there’s mud and leaves in there. There are always going to be mud and leaves in there. Despite my best efforts, the bottom curled up as it dried.
However, there will not be water in there. I don’t think you can see it in this photo, but I drilled a hole NNW of the center hole, near the wall of the bowl. Everything drains out now. Of course, there’s a hole of raw clay, but it just has to be.
There was a small problem with the inner bricks sagging downwards, since the bowl does not fit right up under the granite. I suppose it could, but I’ll have to deal with that some other time. For the time being, I propped up the ends of the bricks with small ceramic scarabs that I bought at the King Tut exhibit last spring. I liked the idea of that.
I also used the scraps from the work table to build a mini-me version to hold the sound table.
I discovered that my multi-outlet has little holes on the back for hanging on walls, so my next little project will be to suspend it from the back of one of the legs. Actually, I’m going to get a second one to suspend from the back of the work table as well.
You can see in the background the packaging from the new miter saw I bought. I’m just accumulating power tools right and left. What can I build next?
Goals
Here we are, end of GHP and vacation, the beginning of the school year, one of those cusps that seem to demand that I set some goals, to figure out what I want to do next. I don’t know why, especially since these are no-brainers. It’s not as if I’m going to not do these things if I don’t write them down, but writing them seems to give them some legitimacy.
- get back into the 24 hour project work. I have #12, #13, and #14 still to set, and they’re all three doozies. I really ought to try to come up with two more movements to go with the string quartet/bassoon piece.
- get serious about my “Field” series of paintings, especially Seth’s commission
- schedule Tai Chi time, and stick to the schedule. Grayson gave me a beginner CD for my birthday, and I’ve only looked at the first section once. The problem is finding time and space. But I must.
- get serious about my ELP sketching, especially faces. Soon it’s going to be time to start sketching in paint as well. It has occurred to me that proficiency in graphite does not automatically transfer to gouache.
- do some writing in the Neo-Futurist vein for Lacuna. The GHP theatre kids used the Neo-Futurist mold for their work this summer and it was a fascinating way to do theatre.
- and of course the labyrinth needs attention: mowing, reseeding, repair, installation of the omphalos
That’s not too much to think about, is it? It does not include routine stuff, like cleaning my study or doing the final reports on GHP, or updating the WordPress software everywhere, or starting back up with Masterworks Chorale and Lacuna Group.
Various updates
I brought the bowl back to the dorm this morning. It’s awfully heavy. I continually fear I will drop it.
The cracks are now a feature, not a bug. When I think back on the puzzle of what to do with the interior, I am reminded of the line from Casablanca: “It seems that destiny has taken a hand.”
I spent an hour with a string quintet this morning reading through and working on Waltz for string quartet & bassoon. A cello subbed for the bassoon. It was great fun, and I was able to help them hear what I heard and to play it. I think that with actual rehearsal it would be a very presentable piece indeed. My friend and colleague Stephen Czarkowski plans to program it this fall, so maybe we’ll get a YouTube video performance of that.
There were three places that I wasn’t sure were effective, and I found that I was right about those as being weak. I was able to fix one of them on the spot, and the other two are simple doubling issues, i.e., I need more oomph at two spots that sounded bare, so all I have to do is copy and paste some notes. Done, for a ducat!
I haven’t blogged about this because it’s been touchy, but for the past week here at the Land of Pan-Dimensional Mice we’ve been under “social distancing protocol” restrictions due to the flu. No one could sit directly next to each other, everyone was issued hand sanitizer, etc., etc. (There is no hand sanitizer in the city. Tomorrow there will be no Sharpie markers.)
The “no touching” thing had some interesting repercussions. We canceled Field Day and the Saturday night dance. (Everyone dressed up in their 80s finery anyway.) I canceled my Grand Ball. We had to cut seating at peformances in half, which meant we had to double the number of performances, which meant increased monitoring duties for me, which meant less time to get the program ready to close out. It was very stressful.
The worst was facing the fact that we were going to have do the final Prism Concert twice, cancel the Friday night Graffiti Dance (the kids sign each others’ t-shirts in a last paroxysm of bonding), and somehow split up Saturday morning’s Convocation. What kind of good-bye is it when half the people you love are not there? And the idea that we were going to keep these kids from hugging each other was ludicrous. The increasing anxiety about this very real downer was getting to everyone.
Last night, however, the word finally came that since we had not had anyone register any symptoms since our only case ten days ago, we were free of restrictions. We could end our summer as we should. And there was much rejoicing.
All in all, we were magnificent. We responded quickly and appropriately, and the kids were fantastic in their good-spirited compliance with the protocols. They were actually grateful that they were still at GHP, and many said so. All the final events were kept on the schedule, and as far as I know no one was turned away from something they wanted to see. We deserve much praise.
Two days, one hour, two minutes until GHP is over.
GHP 2009 Art
Here are my favorite pieces from this year’s art exhibit, in no particular order, other than walking around the gallery.
Bottles, mixed media, by Samantha Bond. You can see the label on the right side of the photo, which should give you a sense of scale. I would love to own this piece. At the top of the white slashes, wire is looped through the canvas, with corks dancing on the end of it. It gives off an odd combination of menace and satisfaction.
Hoof and cube, ceramics, by Will Darnell. This was the artist’s solution to the “problem” of making a teapot. I should have gotten a shot from the other end, so that you could see that the base is actually a hoof and not any other organic form that I’m sure Marc is going to call me out on. I love the kludgy assemblage of forms, and I think the paint job is gutsy. The whole thing dares you to think it’s inept when you can’t stop yourself from watching it.
Old man, oil, by Maggie Ellis. Certainly I would question her title, given the subject’s still-youthful aspect, but since this work sailed directly into ELP territory, I found it both fascinating and instructive. Look for renderings like this from me in the next year or so. (Mike, Eli, you still owe me photos.)
What has 50 teeth and holds a beast inside, a zipper!, ceramics, by Christy Eun-A Kim. Ignoring the cheeky title, I liked the bravura of this piece. It’s just chaotic. Here it is from the other side.
What a glorious mess! One suspects the artist simply got bored one morning and decided to pile it all on and see what happened. A lesson to us all.
Untitled, mixed media, by Aubrey Warnick. A tidily assembled piece, I thought. The interior, of which I need a better detail shot, is encaustic; nails protrude from the surface, and stains run down from them to a collection of twigs jumbled at the bottom.
[update] Here’s a detail:
Lost in translation, acrylic, by Courtney Curtsinger. For some reason, the kids painted faces on everything this summer. They’d have a guest artist who showed them strategies for abstraction, and I’d see a nice painting developing, and then the next day there’d be a face on it. It puzzled their instructors no end, as it did me, but ironically of course such figurative work is my goal for my own work. This was one of the better ones.
At the spring, acrylic and encaustic, by Newnan’s own Katie Turner. Several works showed up this year on bare board. I thought Katie’s use of the encaustic to capture the water and its contrast to the crispness of the legs was quite clever. Again, better focus would show it off better.
Virgin’s first dance, paper and wood, by Christy Eun-A Kim. This is the first time we’ve ever had anything like this: over-the-top origami Harajuku fashion sculpture. Clearly Miss Kim loves her neomannerist torsions.
Here’s an overview of the exhibit, and here’s the other overview:
All in all a good year for art at GHP. I may snag some more images tonight.
[updated 7/23]
Two other pieces:
Untitled, wood, wire, burlap, by Corissa Duffey. This little piece struck me with its combination of form and materials.
Chair with fabric, mixed media, by Jerome F. Kendrick. The self-assuredness of this piece is amazing. Very Noguchi-like, don’t you think?
Omphalos, 7/21/09
All right, who didn’t light a candle?
Yes, those are cracks. They are large cracks.
See??
We are not to worry. We will patch these cracks with a marine epoxy, perhaps even with some colorant. And actually I kind of like the pattern they made.
I don’t know when I’m going to do this. Maybe between midnight and 2 a.m. one evening between now and Saturday.
Tomorrow morning I sit in on a rehearsal of my Waltz for string quartet & bassoon, although I’m not sure whether they ever recruited a bassoon.