Today there is none of that other stuff here– I won’t even utter the “P” word here this morning. As promised, today is about art and music.
This morning I want to link a song and a painting and the piece shown above immediately came to mind. It’s a 20″ by 10″ canvas titled Voyager Blue that is included in my current show, Contact, at the West End Gallery. It has a definite narrative to it, with the small almost indistinguishable figure at the horizon serving as The Seeker, which is often the character that figures portray when they appear in my work. The Seeker constantly searches for meaning, for purpose and for answers in this life.
The song I thought I would attach to this painting is the great folk classic The Midnight Special. This song, whose lyrics first appeared in 1905, is about a prisoner who longs for his freedom and symbolizes it in the form of The Midnight Special, a night train that would carry them away from the despair of their imprisonment. There was an actual Midnight Special train that ran between Chicago and St. Louis but the one depicted in this song is considered to be more likely a train on the Missouri Pacific line, the Houstonian, that ran between Houston and New Orleans, departing just before midnight.
But maybe it simply refers to the night train that is nearest to the prisoner singing for his freedom.
This song has been recorded many, many times over the past century by artists from Leadbelly to ABBA but today I chose a version from the Queen of American folk music, Odetta. It has a nice bluesy sway to it and seems like a good song to push off from on this Sunday morning.
Have a great day. I hope the Midnight Special shines her ever-loving light on you.
This may be the best example yet of how context shapes vision. When I saw the painting, the title that came immediately to mind was “Water Works.” I saw the curving swath of blue as an irrigation canal, and the horizontal band of blue the person seems to be standing atop as a section of the pipeline being built to carry water from the Colorado river to Corpus Christi, taking irrigation water from the rice farmers in the area. It’s not hard to imagine the figure as one of those farmers, some of who feel quite small in the face of circumstance.
It’s an idiosyncratic interpretation, of course, but it’s also a painting that really resonates. If I had a pile of money, I’d buy it in a minute. 🙂
While I see that swath of blue as a night-clad path, I did see it as a watery canal for a while. Maybe not the same irrigation canal that you described but acting in much the same way. The recent alternating droughts and floods make me think about how even though we often pay little attention to the natural world these days, we are still small in the face of it. Much like that small figure.