Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Painting, 2/18/09

Posted on by Dale

I haven’t really painted anything in a couple of days, on the road, busy redefining literacy assessment in Georgia, that kind of thing, but I thought I’d post a little of what I’ve been doing.

This is a little sketch I did on the backside of a series of little tiny sketches which would be too small even to photograph unless I actually used the camera instead of my iPhone, and I’m too lazy for that.

The goal was do a hardcore study of shadows and mass, and in that I think it’s successful. I had intended to make this a more complex thing, but I kind of like it as it stands.

One reason I like gouache as a medium is that it can be blended even after drying. (It can also be used on the palette after drying; very economical.) In this case, I could go back in with shadows and reblend the edges between light and dark, shifting the edges to one side or the other.

My next study will be to see if I can get even half the reflections right. One thing I do realize is that the “white” of the mug itself has to be gray, because otherwise the hotspots of the reflected lights have nowhere to go. My intention is to layer and layer and layer the paint, probably working in fresh stuff from the tubes in a fairly thickish, flat manner, just keep adding and correcting what I see until I’m happy that I’m nearly correct in my observations and the translation of same.

Listening, 2/11/09

Posted on by Dale

I am beginning to detect a pattern to the stack of CDs on my desk: they are lackluster works that did not appeal to me on first listening, and my giving them all a second chance does not seem to be helping.

My most recent trudge is through Music for Quiet Listening, a Mercury Living Presence re-release. As I’ve noted before, the contents are the winners of the Edward B. Benjamin Award for Restful Music, and no, I’m not making that up. It was given from 1953 to 1971 at the Eastman School of Music to that student composer whose composition seemed “best to introduce restfulness in the listener.” How they made it through that difficult time in music is beyond me.

Anyway, the pieces on the CD are soggy modal meanderings that I honestly cannot distinguish one from another. There are twelve of them, and I could not tell when one ended and the next began. I’d look down at the stereo and see that somehow we’d made it from track 3 to track 8 without my noticing.

Ginny pointed out that most of it sounds like 1930s movie soundtracks, and I swear track 7, “Larghetto,” by one Paul Earls, was used in Plan 9 from Outer Space.

So, another CD on the giveaway pile. Next up: Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 3.

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.

Listening

Posted on by Dale

In the Ongoing Listening Project, I am done listening to the Gesualdo Tenebrae. As promised, the harmonies are twisted and startling. The texts are unfamiliar, however, so they don’t jump out at me or stick in my head.

The other problem is that half of each piece is extended recitative/chanting. Very nicely done, but not memorable, and the motets themselves get lost. I tuned out the chant and wouldn’t even be listening by the time the motet started.

So this will go into the collection, but I don’t think I’ll be downloading it to the iTunes collection.

I moved on to a CD called Pacifica, by one Fred Frith, if that is his real name. This is a CD that Marc discovered online, decided it sounded interesting, and in what I’m sure was an act of kindness sent it to me as a gift back during one of my “Oh woe why can’t I compose” periods. Marc has always encouraged me to break free of the tyrannies of Western formal music, forgetting that I don’t play any instrument well enough to improvise. (I downloaded the iPhone app Ocarina last night, so maybe I can learn that.)

So I popped it into the CD player in the van, and I toughed it out for several days. It has not grown on me. I understand the process, but I am not engaged by the product. It’s mostly ugly. This one goes into the Lacuna Fun Tub so I can share it with Marc.

Now I’m listening to another Mercury Living Presence re-release, entitled Music for Quiet Listening. This is the one filled with mellow pieces from the middle of last century, all winners of a competition funded by a music-loving businessman who hated the serialism that was so fashionable in our schools and conservatories at the time. He put his money where his mouth was and commissioned pretty music.

I’ll report back in a few days.

Tango lessons

Posted on by Dale

Last night Ginny and I went up to the Take Hold dance studio/ballroom on Miami Circle (off Piedmont Avenue), where a concern called Tango Bohemia offers Argentine tango lessons. It’s a series of eight lessons for beginners.

Despite our past with dance, despite the fact that our ability to partner each other was a major attraction in those first hormonal months together, we were a bit at a loss as how to do this. Since we haven’t had an opportunity to dance with each other, I mean actually dance, in so long, we’re going to have to relearn that touch. Still, we had a great time and look forward to the next seven weeks.

I don’t know what we think we’re going to do with this skill once we’ve learned it. I mean, does Alamo Jack’s have tango nights? I’ll put in a dance patio on the upper part of the back yard where the Mercedes used to sit, overlooking the labyrinth. We can string paper lanterns for illumination, and dance with the glitter of fireflies and our love.

Doodling, 1/29/09

Posted on by Dale

Many things to do tonight, starting with this post.

In support of our explorations over at Lacuna Group, Wednesday nights if you’d like to join us, and you really really should, I dragged out the 341 poem, which, if you recall, was the first thing that emerged during the 365 project.

It’s actually not bad stuff, and so I made a decision last night to work seriously on it for a while. I may not keep everyone updated as I did back in the day, but if something good happens you’ll be the first to know. You can read all the posts about the poem as it stands now here.

The first thing I have to do, of course, because I want this to be a thing I can work on diligently, is to give it its own Moleskine notebook. I’ve pulled out a small one from my music drawers and am in the process, as I work on other things during the evening, of painting a cover on it.

This is not exactly the waste book approach, but this is not exactly a waste book process. I can focus my “poem energies” in this one place. Or so goes my theory.

In other news, I have listened to John Adams’ Gnarly Buttons and John’s Book of Alleged Dances in the van for a couple of days now and can report on its status. (This is from the stack of CDs on my desk that I’m trying to whittle down.)

Gnarly Buttons is a little mini-concerto for clarinet and is very appealing in many ways. It has some back story to it, but I didn’t read that until I had already made my decision about the piece.

It’s rhythmically complex, almost excessively so, and scored for an extremely oddball assortment: English horn, bassoon, 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass, banjo/mandolin/guitar, and two sampler/pianos who play all kinds of weird sounds, including at one point a moo. (That’s right, a moo.) However, the orchestration is deft and never uninteresting.

There is even actual emotion in several places. On the whole, I think Gnarly Buttons is a keeper.

I’m still unsure of John’s Book of Alleged Dances, a set of 11 short bits for string quartet and prepared tape. It’s not uninteresting, but after I’ve listened to it I’ve already forgotten it. I’m thinking I will not be adding it to iTunes like Gnarly Buttons.

Next up: Tenebrae, by Don Carlo Gesualdo, actual Renaissance prince of Venosa. Gesualdo felt no compunction to follow anyone’s rules, societal or compositional, and his music is usually described as “lurid.” It is good to be the king.

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.

Back to work, kind of

Posted on by Dale

With a clear evening for the first time in a long time, I did a little tidying up (tidying up being a time-honored Lichtenbergian tactic); changed one thing in the GHP video and exported, DVD’d, and burned three copies; had supper; and finally, finally, made myself sit down, turn off the web and email, and put some notes on paper.

I was not very successful. I returned to the opening theme of the symphony and played with that for a while. I played with some chord structures for a while. I played with a few countermotives for a while. I looked at my Fragmentary Exercises and plopped down one measure that might pass as a half-assed attempt.

I wasn’t wearing a hole in that psychic wall, I was just wearing out. So I stopped. But at least I got something on paper, whether it’s worth anything or not.

In other news, I took one of those CDs sitting in a stack on the left-hand side of my table and have been listening to it for a couple of days in the car. This one is the untitled Mercury Living Presence re-release of Howard Hanson and the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra playing some mid-century American greats.

Meh.

Sorry, none of it does anything for me. It’s all very daring for its time: Colin McPhee’s faux-gamelan Tabuh-Tabuhan: Toccata for Orchestra; Roger Sessions’ The Black Maskers, with its crashing seconds and clusters; Virgil Thomson’s Symphony on a Hymn Tune, which has passages of great lyrical beauty, which he insisted on undermining with bizarrely acerbic passages of snark.

But none of it sticks in my head, even after two days of listening. It just registers as so much fashionable claptrap from the 1930s. Into the giveaway pile it goes.

Next: John Adams’ Gnarly Buttons and John’s book of alleged dances. I remember them as being too determinedly “modern,” as if Adams was trying desperately to show the musical establishment that he could resist the siren call of tonality. We’ll see.

As savvy as the Obama team has been about the 21st century, I find it incredible that they didn’t have the John Williams piece performed at the inauguration all ready to roll out on iTunes by 12:01 pm, January 20. I know I said I wasn’t buying anything at least until June, and I haven’t, but I would break my vow in a heartbeat if it were available on iTunes.

An approving look back

Posted on by Dale

After yesterday’s epic cleaning/therapy, it was serendipitous that the first thing iTunes chose to play this morning was Am Südpol, denkt man, es ist heiß. This was the “penguin opera” I wrote back in 2004 for a competition for the opera company in Cologne, Germany.

The libretto was based on a popular German children’s book about penguins who live for opera and the annual visit of the Opera Boat. It was a totally engaging little story, with Scene 1 introducing us to Uncle Otto, his niece (who hates opera, she says), and the young boy penguin; Scene 2 with the opera company as they squabble over roles in La Traviata; Scene 3 in the opera house and the hilarious opera-gone-wrong; and Scene 4 back on the ice, with young Lottie recognizing how much she loves both opera and the boy penguin.

The big finale is all about how Musik fills our lives and is a huge gift, even at the South Pole. Since I began the opera with a Latin overture (keeping with the title’s erroneous claim that it’s hot at the South Pole), I made the finale a bumptious calypso number, ending with everyone onstage dancing in sombreros and sunglasses passed up to them by the ever-rebellious orchestra.

I say all this to say that listening to it again this morning, I was delighted with my work, the entire piece. (I didn’t win the competition, needless to say, but boy did I learn a lot.) The finale is especially engaging, and I offer it to you here: Am Sudpol finale

What’s my point? It was a boost to my self-image, another little nudge to get back to work on something, anything, because when I’m at the top of my form, I’m quite good.

(We will ignore for the time being the flipside, that I’ll never write anything that good again.)

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.