UCTV out of Berkeley, CA has some of the best cultural programming you’ll find on television.
Here’s a wonderful hour talk with the composer Philip Glass and the music critic Tim Page. In the mid ’60’s Glass studied in Paris with my own piano teacher’s famous teacher, Nadia Boulanger. She evidently never revealed what she thought of his work.
Glass talks about his operas based on his early interest in science, about all music being ethnic, the origin of the cello and other fascinating music esoterica. His notes about Kepler’s predictions based on astrology are hilarious, but you’ll have to watch the whole clip before he gets to it.
My friend Phil, who lives outside Paris with his lovely wife Sally- and is a savant about art, poetry and music – said that my newest work reminded him of a Verlaine poem. Now knowing that Paul Verlaine was one of those flowery Symbolists, I wasn’t quite sure how to react. But after thinking it over and doing a little research on Mr. V, I discovered some of his poetry set to Claude Debussy’s music. A favorite composer, Debussy’s transition to his unique mature style emerged with these poems put to his notes. Voilà , a title for my painting.
Then too, in the spirit of Earth Day, this is a recycled work. Inspiration is from the huge tulip magnolia in my front yard, that drops all its pink petals almost as soon as they’ve bloomed.Â
from ‘All Music Guide’: The music is highly chromatic and tonally ambiguous, traits that Debussy would make his own in the next few years. Also, Debussy begins to make heavy use of the dominant ninth chord, one of his later trademarks; indeed, the very beginning of the first song is a series of falling ninths.
From Erik Reischl: Paul Verlaine’s “Romances sans paroles†is a collection of poems written in 1874 during the vagabond period of his life which he shared with the poet Jean-Arthur Rimbaud. Symbolism influences the greater part of his work and is obvious here for the first time. Words become music, become tones and colours in the finest nuances and shades. In January 1885 Debussy began to write music for two of the poems after having been inspired by the musical quality of Verlaine’s poetry.
After winning the “Grand Prix de Rome†for his cantata “L’Enfant prodigueâ€, the young composer went to Rome only days later, where he was to remain for three years in the Villa Medici.
The separation from Madame Vasnier for whom he had written nearly all of his songs and the absence from his beloved city Paris were hard to bear. It is probable that the last four songs of the collection, written between 1885 and 1888, were to be a present for Madame Vanier when he returned.
We had a great turnout of interns from Blooming Glen and Sankanac Farms and one interested future farmer for our first SAITA workshop at North Slope in Lambertville, NJ. The farmer and owner, Mike Rassweiler, was well prepared with handouts and a soil testing exercise on his 50 Acre farm in central NJ. Check his website for great information on fertilizing and his Flickr pages for his examples of profits and loss from his farm over the years. His greenhouses were full of baby greens, bright young basil and had some of the tiniest cell flats I’ve ever seen.Â
He’s been farming this property since 1994 and lives there with his wife Colleen and baby Casey. They offer housing and a 3 year training program to interns and currently have about four people helping out. . A good lab to get your samples analyzed is A & L Eastern Labs in Richmond, VA. I had my own Atlanta garden soil sampled there about 15 years ago.
Not so great video from my little Canon, but worth viewing for Mike’s notes on soil. Watch it here.
Mike is aiming for no till on all the beds and uses ‘living’ shoulders between rows. He cover crops at the end of the season, and uses compost annually on most beds. Since one of his specialties is salad or field mix, he prefers to avoid cross contamination by not using any animal manure. He buys mushroom soil, and has used municipal deliveries of leaf waste in the past, from which he was getting a tipping fee. He does buy some organic fertilizer from Fertrell.
His main 3 acres is bounded by an electric fence for deer, a challenge is erosion and drainage; loss has occurred during heavy rains.
This was once a failed painting, obliterated and now returned to life. Inspiration is spring and Atlanta born Mary Lou Williams’ 1974 ‘Zoning’ CD, on which are two pieces from her ‘Music for Peace’ mass, later called ‘Mary Lou’s Mass’. She’s a jazz pianist to rival none.
Medi I, homage to ML Williams. Oil on canvas 22″x30″.
Grit TV offered a Skype clip tonight featuring activist and public policy lecturer Marshall Ganz talking about community organizing and the politics of hope. In the spirit of Saul Alinsky, Ganz notes how marketing strategies over the past 40 years have replaced organizing strategies, rather than people mobilizing and linking together for a common cause. At least up until recently. He mentions transformational vision as the function of criticality, an understanding of the world’s pain, but also of hope and a vision of the world’s potential.
‘The politics of hope are much more demanding; they require development of our imaginative skills, taking responsibility and looking for opportunity and taking risks to act. That’s the environment we’re in right now. Â ….We are in a fast moment now’.
While the south was having tornadoes, we had our first thunderstorm last week. Always inspiring. Spring is bringing with its new blooms a burst of creativity.Â
Storm over Lancaster Avenue, 16″x20″, canvas on board
I’ve been wanting to do more large abstracts after many months of smaller works. Here’s the latest.Â
April 22″x30″ oil on canvas board
I’m reading Irving Sandler’s 1970 ‘The Triumph of American Painting, a History of Abstract Expressionism’, in which he tells us about artists who took jobs with the Federal Art Project, a spin-off of the WPA. DeKooning was doing odd jobs to get by and this program enabled him to explore his own work full-time after 1936. The gov’t gave about 5,500 artists, craftsmen, researchers, photographers and teachers monthly average stipends of $95 to do whatever they wanted. All they had to do was produce 96hrs of work. The book goes into detail about the plight of the artist during the mid 1930’s. They were thrown together by ‘mutual distress and artist organizations began to form as a natural result’.
Without government assistance these artists might not have created Abstract Expressionism. Another interesting shift was that the Great Depression ‘upgraded the social standing of artists….after the collapse of the economy, artists could shake their feelings of social inadequacy, for the American Dream was proven bankrupt.’Â I think we could say the time has come for the arts to take center stage again, but the administration is going to have a hard time convincing angry Americans to throw money at struggling artists, galleries and museums.
So a couple of nights ago two Great Horned Owls were hooting at each other in the wild bramble of trees and border along the edge of my backyard, and woke me up. It’s the kind of noise that somehow always makes me not only happy, but ecstatic to be hearing a part of nature that so rarely presents itself in suburbia. And it means it’s spring.Â
When I lived in Nova Scotia, my ex and I would go on long hikes back into the woods. One hike brought us to a lake that hadn’t been deadened by all the logging in the area. A female moose was quietly eating from it as we came upon the opening in the thick fir forest. We surprised a porcupine, who slowly waddled out of our way, but the most amazing encounter was a huge horned owl who sat on a tree limb and watched us as we made our way out of the woods at dusk. She didn’t budge – just blinked. The females are larger than the males and this one was big. We kept turning around thinking that she’d fly off. Nope, she wasn’t moving from her spot. Take a listen. Magnificent creatures.
The Obama administration has launched a competition for designers to fix the country’s problems. That’s right, designers. So here’s your chance to stop saying that nobody appreciates that infinitesimal kerning you made to three word copy the other day. Go to the link and read the brief.
Competition submissions are due on April 29, 2009, the 100th day of the Obama presidency. Two weeks later the jury will announce winners and address the public in a discussion at Studio X in New York. Winners will receive prizes and be published in Volume Magazine. The after-image of the competition will be distributed in a publication and traveling video exhibition.
The hope is that not only designers, but artists and thinkers from all walks of life will respond to this call. Most of us probably don’t remember that during the last ‘great depression’, artists were given complete license to create. There was no jurying board, no NEA to define the limitations. I have a posting about that on another site here.
So who came up with this brilliant idea? From the March 11th Architectural Record article :
‘Two students at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Wayne Congar and Troy Therrien, have convened an open ideas competition, dubbed Imagining Recovery, devised to integrate design into the conversation of how and where stimulus dollars should be spent.
Calling the competition an attempt to “make sense of these numbers that are being thrown around,” Congar hopes that the submissions will help interpret the 1500-plus page American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and create visions for the future. In a larger sense, the organizers hope to reorient how design is seen in a policy setting: Architecture and planning ideas should be present in the initial stages of policy creation, Congar says, rather than be part of a reactive process, in which designers are handed projects long after the government has allocated funds for them.
Those entries, according to the Imagining Recovery Web site, may be ideas “in any form, from physical, built objects, to technological applications and interfaces, to campaigns to affect social behavior, to the design of phasing strategies, and beyond.†Submissions are to center around one “experiential image,†which Therrien calls describes as a vision of “what life might be like after that money is spent.†This image should be accompanied by up to six accompanying text, visual, or video documents.
The competition is open to everyone, regardless of age, nationality, or profession. Submissions are due on April 29—the 100th day of the Obama Administration. The jury, which will include MoMA curator Barry Bergdoll and architect Bernard Tschumi, among others, will announce winners on May 13.
Three winners will be given cash awards (amounts are yet to be determined; the organizers are still fundraising). The winning concepts, along with a number of honorable mentions, will be published in a forthcoming issue ofVolume Magazine and be featured in a traveling exhibition to be shown in New York, Beijing, and Amman, Jordan.’
This competition is organized by LAB\RAD, in collaboration with C-LAB, SIPA, the Global Public Policy Network and THE MORNINGSIDE POST.
An Italian friend of mine put up a Woodstock clip on Facebook, this one is Richie Havens singing ‘Freedom’, opening the festival. It still moves me, 40 years later. All of you alumni of Woodstock, think back to 1969….if you can. Bethel Woods Center for the Arts sits on the original site and celebrates the 40th Anniversary this spring. Don’t let those brown acid flashbacks stop you.Â
April is off to a good start. Sold a painting yesterday to a repeat patron and Constance Humphries, a wonderful painter on 1000 Markets, posted this interview on her blog. I’ve added my bigger abstracts as limited edition prints on my shop at Etsy, since they are really too large to ship without huge expense. Larry Gagosian, where are you, dude.
