Well, winter has finally found its way to my little corner of the world. Yesterday, a little snow fell and the temperatures plunged a bit, making it feel more like this time of the year should. I’ve been spending a lot of time examining the past lately, something that I truly enjoy, so I thought on this cold Sunday morning with snow on the ground I would take a short break and listen to some music.
I thought this would be a fitting choice for someone who is looking back. It’s Ryan Adams and his song Oh My Sweet Carolina. This is a delicate acoustic version that I hope you’ll enjoy…
It’s Saturday morning and something made me think about the meaning of patriotism. Out of the blue. I began thinking of an old Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul song, “I Am a Patriot” and a version that he performed back in 1984. It had a long intro that was simply put by Little Steven ( better known to most as Steve Van Zandt of the E Street Band and The Sopranos) and speaks as well to these times as it did 25 years ago.
It may be hard to get past the 80’s look of the clothing and the production of the show this is from but I think it’s still a pretty good anthem for doing what is best for the people of your country first, setting aside self-interest. And that’s what patriots do.
By the way, the painting shown is The Way of the Brave and is currently hung at the West End Gallery in Corning, NY. I thought it fit the song…
Another Sunday morning. Hunting season here, so I listen for the inevitable gunshots that ring through the forests around my place. Not too many. Certainly not like it was a number of years back when it sounded like a shooting gallery on the first days of the season. I’m not a hunter, never really have been , but I have no problem with responsible hunters in the woods. The hunters who have a level of reverence for their prey and selectively hunt. It’s the cretins with no respect for the creatures they’re hunting, who are only out there for a thrill kill, that bother me.
There’s an element of selfish cruelty in these guys that pisses me off because it’s the same element of selfishness and cruelty that is present in so many of the horrible deeds that make one want to turn off the evening news in disgust. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s nothing new, just a part of who we are as a species. How can one expect something to do other than what is in its nature?
That brings me to my song for today from Neko Case, who is a real favorite of mine. It’s People Got a Lot of Nerve and its message is pretty close to what I said above. Why be surprised when any creature, including man, does what is in its nature?
Sometimes, at this point in my year, I spend a considerable amount of my time revisiting past work, going through old image files or leafing through older work that I still have in my possession. It’s kind of a reminder of how my mind has been sparked in the past and I’m always looking for a revival of that spark, especially at the end of a period of time when I have been working a lot and have fallen into what I feel is a too predictable pattern with my painting.
I tend to focus on the odd little pieces when I’m doing this. Pieces with figures in them, odd compositions, odd shapes- things of that nature. I came across this little triptych from 2002 and had to linger over for a bit. I remember it well, the way the surface had a smoothness, almost enamel-like finish and the way the three pieces played off one another. I never fully understood the meaning behind this piece but I was always reminded by it of the music of Richard Thompson, a writer of many wonderful distinctive songs, many of them with dark undertones.
So, I’ll keep looking back, hoping for a rekindling of inspiration, and in the meantime, here’s some Richard Thompson with Mingus Eyes…
Well, I’m still on the road but I should be home and back in the studio tomorrow morning which is always a relief. Back to the routine that I really like and can thrive in.
As I drive I listen to my iPod, usually just leaving it on shuffle so that anything can pop up. Sometimes things come on that I haven’t heard in a while and it’s always a pleasant surprise.
Here’s one that always makes me wish I could sing. It’s from Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz which is a documenting of The Band‘s last concert. It’s a great film and this is a great version of The Weight with a lot of help from the Staple Singers.
It’s a busy Saturday morning as I try to finish up a group of work and hit the road this coming Monday. There’s always a bunch of little things, details, that have to be tied up that seem to take longer than I would imagine.
I’m dropping off new work in Alexandria and Asheville this trip, something I do a couple of times a year. It’s basically a driving marathon with a few stops in between but it gives me a chance to have a face to face with the galleries and tell a bit about the new work. It also gives me a chance to just drive and think which is always different for me than thinking in the studio or at home. It’s a different rhythm with different stimuli. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s just driving.
Anyway, on this cold morning, here’s some old Small Faces, before the addition of Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart and the evolution to simply Faces. I use this song, Itchycoo Park, because it always feels like I’m back as a kid in a car, riding along in my parent’s Chevy in the 60’s when I hear this, listening to it through that single speaker in the dash. It wasn’t state of the art sound, but that was how we heard a lot of great music…
Sometimes when you look behind something that’s been in front of you for years you find out things you would have never imagined otherwise. Such is the case with the song, Nature Boy.
Nature Boy, as recorded by the great Nat King Cole, has long been one of my favorite songs. It has a wonderful haunting melody and tells the story of a “strange enchanted boy” and his search to find love. It always has had a sort of mystical feel to me, a real oddity in the world of popular music in 1948 when Nat King Cole recorded and had a huge hit with it, staying at #1 on the charts for eight weeks.
I was going to just have a short post and put up a YouTube video of Cole’s version but in doing so I saw the name of the songwriter, eden ahbez, and was intrigued. Doing a little research I came across some photos of him such as the one above, from the late 40’s sitting with Cowboy Jack Patton ( who wrote Ghost Riders in the Sky) and a spaniel. I’ll let you figure out who is who in the photo. ahbez’s long hair and attire seemed really out of place for me in thinking of 1948 so I read on.
eden ahbez was a real one of a kind character in the world of music and in general. You could probably guess that from the name which he adopted and wrote only in lower case letters. Born in 1908, he is regarded as the first hippie by many, a long-haired and bearded wanderer who crisscrossed the country on foot, wearing robes and sandals, maintained a vegetarian lifestyle and slept out under the stars. In fact, when Nature Boy hit the charts he and his wife were living under the first L on the Hollywood sign, which stoked a bit of a media frenzy around ahbez. He worked in and frequented a vegetarian restaurant (that’s where he met Cowboy Jack Patton, another interesting character) in 1940’s Los Angeles whose German owners preached the gospel of natural and raw foods. Their followers became known as the Nature Boys.
Not really what I was expecting from a pop songwriter in 1940’s LA. ahbez died in 1995 from injuries sustained in an auto accident. He was 87. His was a truly unique life, just waiting for a biographer to tell the story, and reading the little I discovered makes me find the song even more interesting. Hope you’ll do the same now that you know a bit more about eden ahbez…
Running a little late this morning, getting work ready to be delivered next week, and I check the stats for this blog to find that it’s hit and passed the 500,000 hits mark for this year alone. I’m kind of stunned because when I started this blog last year I was struggling to get 100 hits in a day and the idea of a half million views seemed kind of ridiculous.
Now, I realize that all of these hits are not real readers. I do submit, on a daily basis, to a blog-surfing engine, Alphainventions, that generates tremendous traffic from all over the world. Many of these folks have never heard of my work or blog and simply stop because they are attracted to the images at the top of the post, which is a good thing for someone whose work is based on visual imagery. Many will only stop once or twice but many become regular readers.
So, what does it mean, this 500,000 number? I don’t really know. I guess there is a certain validation of the power of the visual image. I can get a pretty good idea of the reactive power of a painting by how many people respond to it on the blog, so in that way it’s useful to me.
But beyond that, it’s probably just another number, albeit a fairly large one. I’m going to think about this today while I plug along in the studio but first I think I’ll listen to a little Leonard Cohen. Here’s his Tower of Song…
I came across this piece in my archives from several years back with a title, Given to the Wind, that I’ve used on a couple of paintings over the years. The composition is also similar in it’s basic design to a number of pieces of mine, particularly from the time that this piece was completed, around 2004.
I’ve overlooked this painting a number of times when I’ve been scanning my records, not giving it much mind. Maybe the shape and ratio of it in my thumbnails didn’t allow me to see it as well as I would like. But yesterday when I came across this, it was like seeing it for the first time, which for me is an odd thing. I was really pleased with it, really felt it had a fullness, a sense of completion in all ways. It was one of those pieces that didn’t stand out in my memory and didn’t live with me very long, having sold very quickly at a gallery, yet when I saw it made me very proud to call it my work.
I don’t know what I’m trying to say with this. Sometimes I stumble upon something I’ve forgotten and am pleased to discover that it’s mine, pleased that it’s out there somewhere in someone else’s life. I hope they are as pleased with this as I am.
Given that there is a guitar in this piece, I suppose I’ll have a little Monday music. This is Red Clay Halo from one of my favorites, Gillian Welch. As she says, it’s a song about dirt. I’ve always fancied myself a dirt man so this fits, although the clay around here is stony gray.
Came into the studio this morning and when I sat down to write something for the blog, I kept having the chorus from London Calling , the great song from the Clash, running through my head. It’s not what I normally experience early in the morning so I figured it must be from catching part of a documentary on the life of the late Clash frontman Joe Strummer recently.
Interesting life. Interesting guy.
The documentary really captured the spirit that drove 70’s British punk and has had me revisiting Clash music all week in my head. I generally focus on m favorites from the album London Calling. It was a grand album with wide and varied subject matter and sound. And a great cover that was based on one of the classic Elvis albums of the 50’s except with the photo above in place of the King. Just good stuff.
I’m showing two clips of two of my favorites from the LP today. The first is The Right Profile which is about the late actor Montgomery Clift and Spanish Bombs which concerns itself with the Spanish civil war of the 1930’s. They never wrote just simple love songs…
Well, winter has finally found its way to my little corner of the world. Yesterday, a little snow fell and the temperatures plunged a bit, making it feel more like this time of the year should. I’ve been spending a lot of time examining the past lately, something that I truly enjoy, so I thought on this cold Sunday morning with snow on the ground I would take a short break and listen to some music.
Redtree Times 