I’m not sure if Strange Affair is going to be the title of this piece. I’ve had this painting, an 8″ by 18″ image on paper, done for several weeks now and I’ve been waiting for a title to come. Something that speaks of it’s starkness of detail and stillness.
Then I heard a version of a Richard Thompson song, Strange Affair, sung by June Tabor accompanied by Martin Simpson on the guitar, and this piece came to mind. It was as though the character in the painting might very well be playing this very song. Really evocative.
It’s one of those cases of one thing reminding you of something else. I heard Bobby Darin’s swinging version of Mack the Knife yesterday and there’s a line that ends with and Lucy Brown. One of those parts of a song that your mind is somehow attuned to and always hears whenever the song is played.
Anyway, it immediately reminded me of seeing Bea Arthur, of Maude and Golden Girls fame, a number of years back in a one-woman show on Broadway of personal stories and song. Going in, I knew only a little of her career outside the TV roles so I didn’t have high expectations. I was pleasantly surprised by a great show.
I didn’t know much of her Broadway career and didn’t know she originated the role of Lucy Brown in the original Broadway version of The Threepenny Opera back in the ’50’s. She told several great tales about the show and then did a stirring version of theThe Pirate Jenny.
I’m embarassed to say that I didn’t know much about The Threepenny Opera or Brecht or Kurt Weill. Had never heard the The Pirate Jenny and it’s story of a cleaning woman who daydreams of rising from her life of powerless drudgery to become a powerful and cruel pirate. Great song with great imagery and Bea Arthur’s version was wonderful. Angry. You could feel her desire for retribution for every time she was wronged by those who simply overlooked her and took her for granted. It was a very powerful song and one that became and remains a personal favorite.
Anyway, here’s a very good version of The Pirate Jenny from singer Anne Kerry Ford:
I don’t know much about dance, modern or otherwise. Can’t tell a Tharp from an Ailey.
And I can’t dance. The mere thought of moving around in front of a group of people makes me freeze, as though a T-Rex were after me and my only hope of survival was to remain still so he couldn’t see me, a la Jurassic Park. Perhaps it’s a result of painfully stumbling through mandatory dance lessons in my 6th grade gym class. A sweaty twelve year-old doing a clumsy cha-cha in the gymnasium with someone who randomly chosen is not the best basis for a healthy life with dance.
But I have a link to the world of dance through my niece, Sarah Foster. She has danced and choreographed for years, primarily in the Boston area. As I said, I know little if anything about dance but Sarah’s work has always had its own signature idiosyncracy of movement and feel that I immediately recognize. She often uses humor and her own unique view of the world in her work, often evoking chuckles from the crowds who have seen her work. And while I may be ignorant of the history of dance, I can appreciate the inherent beauty of the rhythm and flow of the movement of dance and the visual impact of the moving form, often taking from it inspiration for my own work.
When I was selecting a video of her work to show here, I was torn between two pieces, one more humorous and the other, a lovely bit of movement that has great visual impact. I opted for the more serious piece, Respiration, but highly recommend the other, Reverse Spontaneous Combustion (AKA Mad Science), as well. Anyway, here’s a glimpse into Sarah’s world…
I was sitting at the computer the other day, going through the images of several new pieces that will be going with me tomorrow when I travel to a couple of the galleries that represent me. This piece was still untitled and I sat there, staring at it and trying to determine what it was saying to me, something that would give it a unique moniker. As I struggled, a song came on the stereo and I had my title.
It was from my long-time ( and I mean, long-time) favorite John Prine. It was That’s The Way The World Goes Round and it just felt right. There’s a line in the song, …naked as the eyes of a clown…, that always I always seem to hear when the song is playing, regardless of what I’m doing or how occupied my mind is. There’s something in the song that triggers an innate alarm so that at the moment that line is aboout to be delivered my mind pushes aside whatever it is doing and stops to listen.
This piece seems to fit that line for me. There’s a festive feel in the colors of the fields and the confetti-like sky but there’s a distant feeling there as well. The dichotomy of a clown.
So it has a title now and one that I very much like. The painting is a 12″ by 36″ canvas and will be at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria, VA on Friday.
Here’s a version of the song from John Prine, filmed many years ago as he sat around a kitchen table with friends. It’s not a complete version and it’s interrupted with chit-chat but it’s charming and humorous. Makes me want to sit around and swap songs with him…
I thought I would show a little piece I recently finished. It’s 5″ by 6″ and is on paper. I finished the blocks that make up the background almost a year ago and it has sat on a cabinet behind my painting table ever since. I would periodically pick it up and study it, trying to decipher what it was and where it was going but always put it back in place without doing any more to it. There was a moodiness in its tone that made me wary of how I completed it.
But the other day I finally began to see where it was headed. Simple. let the piece be about the texture and light. let the figure be mere counterpoints to the drama of the environment.
I always like these pieces but am sometimes surprised when others do as well. I consider my little figure paintings to be for my own viewing pleasure so I never have high expectations that others will find anything in them.
Still don’t have a title for this one. I’m considering calling it In My Life, after the great Beatles’ song. In case you’ve forgotten, here’s how it goes:
Once again, it’s the time of the year when the movie, The Ten Commandments, takes to the airwaves, an Easter tradition on ABC. I’m pretty sure I mentioned in the past how much I enjoy this film on so many levels. It has a great epic quality from the solemn narration by its director, Cecil B. DeMille, to the huge sets employed.
It also has a great deal of goofiness in the writing and acting, where I sometimes feel like I’m watching an SCTV skit and half expect Eugene Levy to stumble into the scene. Pure kitsch.
When you throw in the fact that it’s such a great tale, it makes for a great night of viewing.
Here’s something that has very little to do with the movie except for the title. It’s Desmond Dekker‘s early reggae hit, The Israelites. When I hear this song I am immediately transformed to being a kid listening to this song in our kitchen on my Dad’s big old plastic AM radio that had its batteries held in place with a piece of wood in its open backside.
Busy this morning, I wanted to just have a small bit of music on this Sunday so I chose a song from Bonnie Prince Billy, known to some as Will Oldham. I’ve always liked his very distinct style and songwriting and chose this song, I Am Goodbye. Iwanted to have an image to accompany the song so I gave a quick look in a file and came across my old friend here. I thought he might fit the song well.
This is a piece that I did about fifteen years ago, in 1995. He was the first figure like this that I painted and became the basis of a series that I called Exiles which was a creative breakthrough for me at the time. Thankfully, he never was sold or given away and remains with me. He is one of my treasured pieces, holding many meanings in many aspects for me.
But for today, while this is hello, he is goodbye…
I first saw a film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, from Lotte Reiniger several years ago in a series about early silent films. It was made in 1926 Germany and was one of the first animated films made. It’s a form of animation that Reiniger pioneered and mastered, based on Eastern shadow theatre. Using silhouette figures, each is painstakingly cut and hinged then filmed in small movements with time lapse photography to produce motion in the film. This film took three years to complete.
Lotte Reiniger At Work
In this telling of the Arabian Nights stories, I was immediately struck by the beauty and movement of the colors in the film. Each cell was tinted by hand to produce intense bursts of color that gave the film a gorgeous surreal quality. The movements of the figures in the film are smooth and natural, very subtle. I found myself so taken with watching the movements and changes that I found myself not following the story. But I didn’t care. It was beautiful to see and sparked the imagination.
Lotte Reiniger (1899-1981), born in Germany and living most of her post-WW II life in Britain, left quite a body of work from a career that spanned over 50 years, including one of the first film versions of Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle. She’s pretty much unknown in popular culture which is a great shame. Her work is marvelous and deserves to be seen.
I was painting in the studio yesterday and I threw on a movie that I hadn’t seen in years, Ball of Fire starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. It’s a great comedy from1941, written by Billy Wilder and featuring some of the great character actors of the time.
I only mention this because there’s a great scene of Stanwyck performing as a nightclub singer with Gene Krupa, the legendary drummer , and his band. They perform Drum Boogie and if you ever doubted that your parents or grandparents knew how to rock, this will put those doubts to rest.
Try to stay with it to the end. Krupa does a part where he changes Drum Boogie to Matchbox Boogie and plays the song with wooden matches as his sticks. There’s a lesson in there for artists about the power of contrasts.
There’s an old piece of film that I have often seen in snippets, usually in a montage about the earliest days of film in the late 1890’s. It’s a short film of a dancer with swathes of fabric twirling, very modern dance-ish in style, and as she spins the fabric changes color. It’s a pretty mesmerizing piece of fim, even more so given the infancy of the medium of the time.
Doing a little research I found that this was filmed by the French film pioneers, the Lumiere Brothers, in 1896. Each film cell is handpainted to achieve the color effects. The dancer in the film is Loie Fuller, an American-born pioneer of modern dance who was the toast of Paris in the 1890’s, starring often at the Folies-Bergere.
I find this film quite enchanting which is pretty amazing considering how many different moving images, how much computer generated animation and other advances in film-making I, like most people, have witnessed in this time, over 110 years in the future. Can you imagine how mind-blowing this must have seemed to the average person of the day?
This point is well illustrated in the movie, The Magic Box, a 1951 film in which Robert Donat portrayed British inventor, William Friese-Greene, who had invented and patented the motion picture camera a year before Edison but never received any credit and died in virtual anonymity. In the film, when he finally is able to fully demonstrate the motion picture with his invention he is alone in his lab, late at night. He is frantic with excitement and runs out into the London streets to let the world know of his triumph. The only person he encounters is a London police officer, played by Laurence Olivier. The bobby suspiciously goes along with Friese-Greene thinking he has a psychotic on his hands. He hesitantly agrees to look at Friese-Greene’s demonstration and when the film rolls and the images of the London citizens strolling in Hyde Park appear, he is frozen with amazement. It is as though he is looking on a true miracle. And perhaps he was– the miracle of invention.
Anyway, take a look to see a beginning point and realize how far we have come…
Redtree Times 