Our first two recipients are Kevin McInturff, and in a bit of meanness I could not help, Mike Funt.
Category: art
Summer Countdown: Day 32
Lichtenbergian goals
I checked the range of the former viola part in its new habitat of third violin (in Waltz: Allegro gracioso). Fortunately, there’s a tool that does that for you, not only identifying notes that are out range of the selected instrument but offering to move each one up an octave (or to wherever else you like). It took no time at all.
Upon repeated listening, I think I can actually strip out a great deal of the piano’s doubling of the viola part. That doesn’t leave the piano with a lot to do, but what it does is critical. And I think the bass drum part can be assumed by the timpani altogether. The tempo as I have it set now may be a little too fast as well. Ah well, it all has to reach performance first anyway.
I emailed Wallace Galbraith with the link to the AFO page here, and explained more of what I had in mind for each one. Then I went on to Facebook and posted a link to yesterday’s post and invited everyone to come vote on their favorite. So far, it’s pretty much an even split between Rondo and Waltz, with Resignation coming in third. I am a bit surprised at how popular Rondo is, given its completely fragmentary status.
Lichtenbergian distractions
As predicted, the Artist Trading Card project is a complete time sink. I love it. I created four cards and all the packaging that goes with the mailing back and forth. To me, part of the fun of the project is the total look and feel I’ve come up with; I’ve turned it into a “thing.” You’ll see what I mean when your chance arrives in the mail. I could just use plain #10 envelopes, after all, but where’s the fun in that?
Speaking of which, I mailed off two ATC packages yesterday. I’ll announce tomorrow who’s getting them.
At the moment, my cards are tending toward dadaistic collage, although I may inject a figural study in there every now and then. I’m afraid the first four are not very well thought out. I was excited to get them out the door and so made them in a rush of energy if not creativity. Sorry guys. I’m doing better on this next set.
Artist Trading Cards
As I was rummaging around Sam Flax yesterday, I stumbled across a small display of Artist Trading Cards supplies. I had completely forgotten about the concept, which I stumbled upon a couple of years ago and bookmarked as a neat thing, but which I’ve never gotten around to doing.
I never let a valid Lichtenbergian distraction pass me by, of course, and the materials were inexpensive, so I bought two packs.
Simple explanation: pieces of cardstock, 2-½ x 3-½, you put art on them and trade them. (Needless to say, you don’t have to buy the cards. You can cut up your own cardstock to the correct size.)
Here are some links:
- Basic Wikipedia explanation
- A consortium (I like the concept of the swap thingies they have going on.)
- An amazing gallery of work (Click on the names on the right to be overwhelmed.)
Some examples, all from the above links:
But Dale, you ask, what has this to do with me?
heheheh…
One day, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps next week, but soon , you will receive in the mail a little box, and in that box will be two ATCs, one from me. There will also be three blanks. You will make three new ATCs, two of which you will mail back to me. (Postage and labels will be included.) I will keep one and mail the other one to the next victim artist.
It’s a game, see? We’ll all have fun. I’ll post the current player two days after I mail the box and post the samples that come back to me.
If you want to play and you’re not sure I have your mailing address, email me. Don’t bother letting me know you don’t want to play. Of course you do.
Art & Fear: 5
More thoughts on the idea that each choice you make , each brushtroke, each sentence, each musical phrase , limits your final product.
Of course it’s true in the simplest sense. If I start with a big slap of red paint in the middle of the paper, I know that I’m never getting rid of it. Red just doesn’t go away. If I start with a musical idea, that idea already has determined whether I can write a sonata or a fugue.
(When Shostakovich was a student, he was assigned a fugue statement as an exercise. He worked all night on the counterpoint but could only cobble together something he knew was “wrong” in the academic sense. When he turned it in the next day, he discovered why he had had problems: he had copied the phrase incorrectly, with one note wrong. Such is the rigor of the fugue.)
However, I have found that when I’m working on my music, these “wrong turns” don’t often happen. I’m such a formalist that I generally have a roadmap to guide me, and even though I may find the going tough, I have a picture in my head of what the piece should be when I’m done.
In fact, that’s my main working method on larger pieces: listen to the playback obsessively and check for what’s “missing.” It may be the accompaniment to the melody is wrong, or the shift from one motive to another is clumsy, or sometimes it just needs more cowbell.
It is a comfort to me that this is how Beethoven worked. Mozart may have written his symphonies down straight out of his head, but Beethoven erased and scratched out more than he published. He rewrote the opening of his Fifth eight times before he got it “right.” So that’s why it doesn’t bother me to have a music piece that won’t yield up its secrets. I know that I just have to keep working.
It occurs to me too that composing is very different in that regard from painting. My painting so far is littered with abandoned works, stuff that I just can’t see a way forward on. My music, not so much. Only the Symphony in G, and nothing prevents me from picking it up again and jerking it into shape.
Summer Countdown: Day 36
Just another couple of sketches. I did a lot of reading and writing on the side, but on the whole I was not very productive today.
My subject’s pose (this is for the ELP) has a lot of foreshortening challenges, so I was very frustrated in my inability to get the silhouette right. That’s one reason I only got three sketches done: I was constantly erasing, reworking, revamping. I know, I know, just produce lots and lots of bad stuff instead of one perfect one.
In the good news department, I realized with a shock that I have nearly filled this sketchbook and will need to purchase another one before departing for Art Camp on Sunday!
Art & Fear: 4
…The first few brushstrokes to the blank canvas satisfy the requirements of many possible paintings, while the last few fit only that painting , they could go nowhere else. The development of an imagined piece into an actual piece is a progression of decreasing possibilities, as each step in the execution reduces future options by converting one , and only one , possibility into a reality.
That moment of completion is also, inevitably, a moment of loss , the loss of all the other forms the imagined piece might have taken. [p. 16]
This is a fearful thing, indeed, if you allow yourself to think that every brushstroke you lay down is in fact a closing off of infinite possibilities. It really means that every brushstroke is the “road not taken,” and the laws of statistics would seem to dictate that the majority of paths you take are the wrong one. You have doomed your work by that very brushstroke.
However, there is another way to look at it which might preserve your sanity. I figured this out after a couple of egregiously misapplied slaps of paint. To quote Big Sam, “It ain’t quittin’ time till I say it’s quittin’ time.”
The authors were talking about holding on to that vision you had when you started your work, and how difficult that is as the work begins to shape itself. Indeed, if you have actually made it to the endgame and have been able to force your materials to do your will, then every action you take has the potential to be ruinous. How sculptors do it I’ll never know.
But for me, and especially at this point in my painting, such fears are stupid. I’m not a master, nor am I particularly adept. I can do any damn thing I please with the painting in front of me. This was driven home one day when I was executing as series of figure paintings and one was just ugly, plain ugly.
“What the hell,” I thought, “it’s ruined. I can’t do anything to it that would make it less artistically valid.” And I just started messing with it: garish colors, shadows where there weren’t before, bold slashes of form and color. Somehow it began to pull together , and when I was done, no, it wasn’t successful. But it was provocative, and I immediately used the extreme measures I had just played to create another sketch that was rather pleasing to my sight.
If this were not a family-friendly blog, I’d post both for you to see.
The main thought I had here though was that a) you don’t have to see each action you take as necessarily limiting what you end up; and b) you’re really better off not seeing the completion , or abandonment , of a work as the death of its infinity of alternates. That’s what a series is for, after all. You think you could do it differently? Do it. Call it #2.
Summer Countdown: Day 37
It seems as if I didn’t get a lot done today, but I did a great deal around the house that isn’t on my List. Niggling, yes. I actually sketched more than I’m showing, but this is a family-friendly blog, so you’ll just have to wait for the gallery exhibit to see the culmination.
One of those mouths is actually very accurate.
A strategy I’m going to try next is to trace the outline of the object that I’m working on and overlay that on my drawing , a way to tell where my eye/hand is missing it.
Art & Fear: 3
Art & Fear does suggest a remedy for the problem of destination for your work:
A. Make friends with others who make art, and share your in-progress work with each other frequently.
B. Learn to think of [A], rather than the Museum of Modern Art, as the destination of your work. [p. 12]
And that exactly is what I have in the Lichtenbergian Society: a group of creative men who joke about their procrastinatory proclivities, but who are in fact a vibrant core of collaborators. The fact that we gather at the Winter Solstice to record our artistic goals for the following year, and to confess progress, or not, on the previous year’s goals is enough to make them my [A].
But of course we gather throughout the year, and many times the question arises, “What are you working on?” We don’t exactly trot out our work and pass it around like the Inklings did, although I do show some of my paintings, but just the opportunity to talk about our work is enough. We also have our blog to share on, and I usually post any music in progress on my blog.
I guess I’ve solved the [A]/[B] problem for my painting. After all, most of what I’m working on in that regard is for the Lichtenbergians anyway. It’s with my music that I haven’t solved the [B] aspect quite yet. It would help if the Lichtenbergians could play in a string quartet. Lousy slackers.
Summer Countdown: Day 38
Lichtenbergian goals:
- filled some pages of the sketchbook with studies of eyes and noses, both generic/anatomical and specific. It was interesting to me that while I think I was able to capture the specific shapes of various Lichtenbergian eyes and noses, I don’t know that you could identify the Lichtenbergian from his isolated feature. Mike’s eyebrows might be a giveaway, maybe. Or maybe I’m just not accurate enough yet.
- read some more Power of Now and Art & Fear.
Today I’m working on mouths, and I may try painting some details as well.
Lichtebergian procrastinations:
- reset the clay pots at the cardinal points of the compass deeper into the ground, so that I can mow over them. (These are the pots I put the citronella candles in.) Having mowed over one of them and nicked it still, I may have to set them deeper.
- stripped ivy from the trees where it had taken over. This was not as time-consuming as I had feared: all that foliage is produced by very few strands, although on the cherry laurel up by the table the stems were as thick as a sapling. Still, it’s a soft kind of wood and easily cut and easily removed.
Summer Countdown: Day 39
A slow start, but a start. I’m still in “getting down to business” mode, which includes running errands and tidying up my environment.
So for Thursday, June 17, I read and responded to Art & Fear, and did some reading in two new books, The Power of Now and Walking Meditation.
As for my creative goals for the summer, I did get three pages of sketches done: one line drawing, one gesture drawing, and some attempted details. No progress, really.