Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Listening, 2/26/09

Posted on by Dale

I do apologize for not blogging regularly these days. Perhaps I need to blog about that.

Just joking. I can’t even get my thoughts together for that kind of metablogging. I’d like to think that my brain is in such a creative turmoil that I’m afraid to commit any of my ideas to writing. Sure, let’s just go with that.

So my most recent CD in the ongoing Listening Project is Symphony No. 3, Philip Glass. The CD contains the aforesaid symphony, plus Interlude No. 1 from The CIVIL warS; Mechanical Ballet from The Voyage; Interlude No. 2 from The CIVIL warS; and The Light.

At first, I was not overly engaged by the music, but the more I listened to it, the more I understood each piece and even began hitting the back button on the car stereo to hear a track again, always a sure sign of my listening investment.

The third movement of the symphony in particular caught my fancy. It’s the slow movement of the work, beginning with a Glassian pulse in the low strings. (The entire work is for strings only.) Eventually, after the chaconne-like harmonic progression has been established, a solo violin enters, sweetly singing in a higher register, with a syncopated upward leap in its melody. Then, without our even noticing it, a swirling triplet figure detaches itself from the underpinnings and becomes a second violin melody in counterpoint to the first one, and then another, and then another, until we have multiple melodies spinning up and down their scales and trills and melismas. All the while, the throbbing accompaniment ebbs and flows, and we keep the upper melody as signposts on the way. It is quite lovely.

I also quite liked The Light, a symphonic poem which is the usual Glass thing: counterpoint, syncopation, stirring outbursts and climaxes. Quite a happy piece by his standards.

So this one’s a keeper.

At the moment my two Listening companions are Discreet Music, Brian Eno, and Skys, by one Michael Danna. I’m about done with those, I should have posted this piece days ago. Because of my impromptu Wikipediaing of Glass, I have dug his Symphony No. 8 out of the pile and will work on that next. I also retrieved the Symphony No. 2 from the shelf and will give it a whirl.

The problem with this is that then I start hearing this kind of music in my own head. I’m not sure that’s where I want to go with my music.

Painting, 2/24/09

Posted on by Dale

I began my “close observation” painting the other day but haven’t had time to blog about it.

Here’s the first pass:

Bold, ugly, blocking out shapes and masses.

Second pass:

Still pretty “slashy,” but already getting more detail in the handle and around the rim. Also, I reshaped everything: the mug is wider, and the handle is more accurate.

Signs

Posted on by Dale

Over the weekend, outside of Greensboro, NC, we came across this:

I made Ginny pull over so I could get out and take a picture.

Yes, it’s too easy to make fun of rural-ish ventures such as this. It makes me look boorish, an issue that has arisen in the 341 poem as I try to figure out what I’m trying to say in that particular work of art.

And yes, a Tuff Man contest in the arts center is no more ridiculous than the Miss Georgia Teen pageant that our own Centre hosted several years ago. In fact, I’d say it’s exactly equivalent: the investiture of prescriptive sociosexual norms in a communal glorification.

However, this dichotomy of macho manhood and the arts has raised itself [ed. note: that was for Marc] in our efforts over at Lacuna Group. Four of our five artists involved there are men, and part of the material we’re grappling with is the risks/pleasures/pains of defining ourselves as creatives in a society that does not necessarily see that as congruent with Tuff Man ideals.

So it amused me to see an arena that we probably regard as a haven from such things hosting such things. The worm i’ the’ bud, as it were. And with one more serendipitous link to that charming phrase, I’ll open the floor for discussion.

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.