Saturday morning, the sun is shining and I find myself cautiously optimistic. It makes me somewhat suspicious.
So let me show a small piece that I recently finished, simply called Snakes for the time being. It’s the type of piece I like to do periodically to more or less cleanse the palette, clear the head and try to reboot the brain. Shake things up a bit. I’ve done others like this, some with fish-like squiggles in a swirl, and find myself strangely drawn to them.
I like the abstract quality and and I like the process of painting them, weighing each new element as its added against the existing pieces of the picture. Like putting together a jigsaw puzzle that changes with each piece that goes together.
I guess I used snakes for this composition for their shapes and flexibility of form. I have nothing against snakes but I’m not a big fan of handling them and when I run across them I give them their space. This past year we stumbled across one basking in the sun behind my studio. He was coiled in a pile like a short piece of thick black hose. Must have been at least an inch thick with slightly blacker markings running up each side of his dark length, biggest snake I’ve seen around our place. We gave him some room. Later, after looking up what type he might have been we concluded he was some sort of rattler (we couldn’t see his tail’s end) or ratsnake. Impressive.
How that brings us to this piece of music makes little sense. This is a piece from Karl Jenkins, his version of Dies Irae, which translates as Day of Wrath, taken from the Latin hymn of the 13th or 14th century. I guess the suspicions of my early morning optimism have spawned a severe reaction in that I find myself playing a piece of music based on the biblical Day of Judgement . Go figure. Make of it what you will…
Redtree Times 