What's Music Got to Do with It?

Can you see and hear the connection of this painting, Night on Bald Mountain, with Mussorgsky's evocative music?

Night on Bald Mountain: painting by Janet Strayer

 Many painters I know like to listen to music as they paint. Not me. Music often takes me away with it,  my full attention absorbed, so that I can't be fully involved in the painting process.  Yet music often lingers strongly in my mind, affecting my mood and the rhythms of the next painting I start. That's the case with my Night on Bald Mountain. 

Though it was originally composed on St. John's eve (midsummer), this music always comes to my mind in wintertime when the ground is barren, the colors are muted, and the trees and land forms are silhouetted in a dusky atmosphere. 

Listening to Rimksy-Korsakov's orchestration of this tone-poem is especially wonderful on a winter night,  temperature falling as the dark flickers with with shadowed light. Surprising to learn that this famous piece of pictorial music was ill-received by Mussorgsky's mentor. It was pulled off the public charts by its young creator in mortification. Yet the music lingered in its creator's mind. Despite several attempts to shape it for public presentation, Mussorsky's version was never publically  performed during his lifetime-- only to become famous after R-K's appreciation of this work and his own orchestration of it after Mussorgsky's death. The music subsequently become riotously famous in contemporary times after Disney (with Igor Stravinsky's help) fabulized it in Fantasia (1941, click for youtube clip) 

Grateful to R-K for realizing Mussorsky's auditory vision, I'm left pondering (once again) the syncretic and generative nature of art.  Night on Bald Mountain demonstrates again for me the richness and depth of many art forms that beckon and beget themselves anew -- in slightly or even drastically altered form. This occurs in a single artist's own works and, of course, it occurs across artists. In this context, appropriation is no sin. Nor is it  to be regarded as a glibly cast-off hand-me-down. Rather, it can be a genuine tribute and enrichment of art for its own sake. Who is the "authentic" composer of Night on Bald Mountain? Depends where you want to start ... and stop.... your search.

Happy Winter Solstice and Holidays,   

 

Defiant Grief: Antigone Today

Defiant Grief is a painting from my archives. It is now on exhibit with other powerful  artwork at the Moat Gallery in Vancouver's stunning central library. The exhibition began on Canada's Day of Remembrance,  in honour and remembrance of the people slain in the Montréal Massacre, our own very poignant example of the worldwide violence towards women. The exhibition continues  until Dec. 28 . It encourages awareness of and social action against violence to women. Hope you get to see the powerful work displayed and organized by Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelters.

My own personal statement about this painting is that I wish it to serve as a testament to the deep grief that underlies our defiant resistance to violence. It is called Defiant Grief  in order to acknowledge that this defiance is born of grief for all who suffer at the hands and will of the more powerful and unjust. This is a substantive grief that transforms into strength -- not just for endurance  but for wilful action. Both principled determination and a strong reservoir of feeling underlie women's resistance, not only to outrages committed against individuals, but also to aspects of society that permit such abuse.

Although the painting is an individual testament, it also calls to mind the ancient Greek drama of Antigone's resistance to the state/tyrant. Perhaps like this enduring heroine, we cry, we scream, we rage, and we gather our considerable strength to resist and work against such outrage.

As this season of political infamy turns to upcoming winter festivities and holiday celebrations, perhaps it is worth remembering.

And good wishes to you all.

More Creative Life News

You can read and see more about creative life, travels, tips and creative adventures by this itinerant artist at Creative Life News at https://www.janetstrayer.com

Regards, Janet 

Death, Art, and Maudie

Not the most attractive title for a blog, I know. But it succinctly captures the reality of my recent experiences, which might be of some more general interest or reflection.

I was called out from my peaceful slumbers early one morning on Saturna Island by the phone ringing at my bedside. It was a death in the family. Someone much too young and with a still young family.

I took the first ferry off island, and then onto a plane headed to the east coast.  A doleful trip. Those of you who know such loss and sorrow in your lives need no more details of the heavy, dull, yet churning emotions en route ... or of the communal experience a family funeral exacts.

Tired but needing to distract myself en route, I turned to the airline movie selection and chose Maudie. A biographical film about the Nova Scotia artist, Maude Dawley Lewis, and set in the 1930s, it is directed by Aisling Walsh and features fine performances by Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke. 

link to global news commentary

 Overtly crippled by arthritis and disparaged by family and small-town judgements, Maud lives and works as house-cleaner for a poor, inarticulate, and rough fish peddler, Everett, in a house that seems barely more than a shack. Hardly the scenario for art or romance or some sort of success. And yet it is ... of a different sort.

The improbable happens. Maud is affirmed in love and in art, the latter being celebrated from locations as unlikely as Nixon's White House. It is no fable, yet the story has a fable's simply constructed trials, wonder, and moral outlook. Where better to find the truth of what one seeks or hopes for?

I cried as I watched it, stuck in the middle seat of a plane full of people, my eyes spilled with rolling tears. I was too tired, too drawn out of my life, to care much about my public appearance at the moment. In any case, these were not sentimental tears, but ones that seemed just: for the harsh realities of life. In this art-as-life movie, they were for a woman so bent yet strong, so afflicted yet affirming, so simple, direct, persistent, and brave in her art and in her life. Her circumstances were harsh, her health impaired by multiple factors, and her resources so substantially and financially constrained. Yet she endured and enriched, without triumph but with affirmation.

And, as with empathy, in general, the feelings evoked in the movie expanded to my immediate world.  A world so different than Maud's, so jam-packed with greed, excess, deliberate hypocrisy and self-serving righteous attitudes, where the political and personal get so regularly demeaned that they become TV fodder displayed as info-tainment. Where art is so commodified and artists so competitive that one questions where the "spirit" in  inspiration went. 

I sometimes despair of such a world, yet cherish the moments of what I'll call "Maud's world" for their simple pleasure and appreciation of the richness of life when it is lived and loved for its own sake and on its own terms. Hers seems a world that, when death comes knocking, isn't met with an "Is that all there is?" summary but with "I loved and was loved."

Maud  Lewis outside her home, see global news link

"Can you teach me to paint?", a sophisticated woman asks. Maud smiles that incandescent smile of hers, and quickly dismisses the woman's request, chuckling a bit with her gaze turned upward. "Owh, you can't teach that," she simply says.

Perhaps you can't. That kind of art stems from the untutored and very personally experienced appreciation of life. Something so simple, so profound, it cannot be taught.  

More Creative Life News

You can read and see more about creative life, travels, tips and creative adventures by this itinerant artist at Creative Life News at https://www.janetstrayer.com

Regards, Janet 

Dreams and Loving Vincent a

This is a love letter. I love Loving Vincent.

Loving Vincent is the world’s first fully oil painted feature film. It is a masterwork,  A gorgeous and gripping ensemble of painted visual art cinematically woven together. Not cartoony, not animé, but its own uniquely lush and painterly rendition of cinematic action. It's emotionally gripping, even without the plotline, which adds a touch of detective drama and mystery to the circumstances of Vincent's death. 

It took five years to finish production of this film. No wonder, after you see it. It's a triumph of love and technique. Written and directed by Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman, produced by Poland’s BreakThru Films & UK’s Trademark Films, it was funded by the Polish Film Institute. Kudos and appreciation to them for getting this huge ball of creative effort rolling. It's a stellar tribute and triumph.

The film brings the paintings of Vincent van Gogh to life and tells his remarkable story, with a twist of mystery added to it. Every one of the 65,000 frames of the film is an oil-painting, hand-painted by 125 professional oil-painters. Then there are the storyboard illustrators, animators, cinematographers, and all the crew it takes to make a feature film.

Although Poland has a wonderful tradition in both cinematic and graphic art, there reportedly were not enough qualified artists in Poland, so that local talent was enhanced by artists from across the world coming to studios in Poland and Greece to be a part of the production. Even the actors used as models in the production look uncannily like actual characters in van Gogh's paintings!

from online trailer 

Watching this fascinating film, I was stunned by how quickly and thoroughly it drew me in. The black and white scenes (like flash-backs in a traditional movie) were intense, and at times so photographic I thought they were filming actors in black and white, rather than painting them. 

The colored scenes are just thrillingly gorgeous, with enough quirky stylistic changes to peak your interest as you travel through, not only van Gogh's paintings, but the whole painted storyline with its interesting, amusing, and dramatic personae and plot. You hardly think about how impossible a feat it is to be watching paintings move! 

I read subsequently that it took about 12 frames of individual oil paintings make up each second of Loving Vincent. That means a total of 65,000 paintings were used to produce the entire film. The batallion of painters spent up to 10 days painting just one second of film.

The result is breathtaking. If you haven't seen it, you must. And if you have seen it, you might like knowing something more about its production. Here's a brief BBC video interview by Sarah Wimperis that will give you a glimpse behind the scenes and into the process: click 

I'm glad that paintings contributing to this film are available for sale. I very much enjoyed looking at the online site showing them, along with 16 pages of photos and profiles of the artist/painters . How wonderful and torturous their labors must have been. I do wonder, though, to whom the paintings belong: the film producers, the painters, ...? What a feat to be part of a masterwork in our own time!

Dreams

While thinking over my experience of Loving Vincent, another film popped into mind. I recalled Dreams, a Japanese film by Akira Kurosawa that I'd seen in the 1990s. He is one of my favorite directors and a master visual stylist, creating beautifully epic tableaus.

A departure from his typical films, this one (the only one written by Kurosawa himself) is composed of dream vignettes. In particular, one episode, "Crows", deals with  van Gogh (played by another fine director, if less-than-convincing actor: Martin Scorcese).

The camera begins in gallery and moves across several of van Gogh's brilliant paintings while a solitary art student gazes at them. At one point, the student leans into a painting of a stone bridge with women working below it. Suddenly, he is inside the painting, which now has become the actual French countryside, and he is asks the women where he might find van Gogh.

from Crow segment of  Dreams (click to see online video lnk)

 The student journeys onward through many identifiable van Gogh scenes, some of them films of actual countryside, others (like Loving Vincent) close-ups and sets of van Gogh paintings. The student is always photographed as in a usual film (not painted) and he remains so, even as the scenes he walks through change from photography to painting. 

For me, a surprising pictorial moment occurs when the student, walking in the actual countryside, finds it  has turned into an ink painting:

online link

He subsequently traverses more richly painted backdrops. But, as an actual person, he's not fully integrated into the painted scene (in contrast to in Loving Vincent). He remains a foreign body inserted into it.  It's a different kind of statement, but seems to me a trail-blazing precursor.

For example, having the student blunder into the thickness of the paint (see below)makes this a palpably different experience for us watching than the more unified Loving Vincent. The dialectic between the actual and the imaginative creation is visible and mediated by Kurosawa's film itself. He conveys the tension of engaging in creation in a way that is both highly sophisticated and joyously naive.

Kurosawa is one of the great directors of the 20thC, who made stunningly beautiful movies -- even of mass carnage in combat. To learn that he was also a painter, often spending time painting pictures of every scene, makes the Crow segment of interwoven film and paint media even more meaningful. In his own words, "My purpose was not to paint well. I made free use of various materials that happened to be at hand." But the actual shots framed in his films clearly represent a realization of what he'd visualized (and often painted) beforehand.

A personal footnote to the magic of the moving picture:

As a very young child I was fascinated by a TV show that encouraged its tiny viewers to draw on the TV screen (plastic overlay sheet required). Whatever you drew would be incorporated into the plot in order to complete the scene for the show's cartoon characters. For example, you would draw a bridge to help a funny little guy get across a river, or crayon in a ladder for him to reach a window, or give him wings so  he could fly.

The idea was that if enough of us created the needed device, it appeared on screen and our little person would get out of a jam or get something desired. And of course, in the next few moments, a bridge, ladder, or wings appeared in the show, and the action was completed on screen.

For me, this show was enchantment itself. I was the creator of a small bit of magic that worked. I saw it happen on TV! This engagement in the process of art making reality has never left me, though I do wish I could now be as effective in changing the world as I was then.

More Creative Life News

You can read and see more about creative life, travels, tips and creative adventures by this itinerant artist at Creative Life News at https://www.janetstrayer.com

Regards, Janet 

The Story of a Painting and What Makes It Sell

You know that I'm a painter, right? Like many painters who enjoy or are impelled to paint, I'm a prolific artist who completes more works than can shown in public exhibitions or sold. Still, sometimes I just know that a certain painting has a certain zing to it: it just has to been seen in public and sold to someone who loves it. 

I'll try to explain it this way: the painting hits the mark... my own mark first, by surprising me in ways that both ring authentic to what I intended and go a bit beyond this in interesting ways. I want to keep looking at such an artwork. And, getting anthropomorphic, it wants to go out into the world!

Typically, these zing-artworks do get reaction from the public, one way or another. Some of them also get purchased. Which brings me to what I think is an interesting story for all those who wonder about what makes a painting sell. I'll stick to specifics rather than try to speak to the generalities of selling art (a quagmire of opinions -- all of them right to some degree).

This story is about one painting that not only sold, but sold triple-times! The first time was when it was shown in an open-studio show I did presenting some  new works. Early in the show, a man who had been standing looking at this painting in less than the best viewing conditions started nodding to himself, called someone on his cellphone, then with speed and much excitement, walked over to me. "I'll buy it!" he pronounced. His cheque followed immediately. I wrapped the painting for him to pick up later that day.

Within a week, I got a call from the same man, now somewhat embarrassed. Would I come pick up the painting at his huge house and return his cheque? He loved the painting, he insisted, but his wife worried that it might offend some of their visitors. Poof!

Of course I did that. Who wants a controversial painting hanging in their house? (Well, you might answer that one differently). I was disappointed, but consoled myself that art is such an individually meaningful exchange, it's best when it fits well with its purchaser. 

I didn't show the painting again for a year.  I decided to change an aspect of the boy's face and hair in the interim and repainted part of it. I do this kind of thing when a painting remains with me to look at for a lengthy time. Sometimes, it starts telling me things. They were small changes, but I think the result was even better. 

I made a card of the painting and had it among other cards available for visitors to my Saturna Island studio. This past summer, I had quite a few visitors, and many conversations about art, island life, and whatever matters. The cards of this painting were often pocketed as souvenirs.

One day a visitor asked if I could bring the actual painting. He was surprised it hadn't sold (but it had, once before) and came again, with his wife. He wanted the painting and would pay whatever the asking price. His wife looked startled and asked him to step outside. 

Uh-oh. I knew at once. And you now also know what happened. I heard him protest in the hallway, "but I'll keep it in my study." I shrugged, knowing how this was going to turn out.

When they walked back into the studio, I immediately short-circuited things by mentioning that I understood this painting wouldn't really fit into their lives. I cared about things like that.  Nothing like "divorce-by-painting" for me. OK, done deal = no deal. 

By the way, it could just as well have been "woman-wants/man-doesn't" theme to these events, but it hadn't worked that way two times running. So, back the painting went into storage. I felt a bit sad about its history of two almost-but-no sales. Still, looking at the painting itself made me happy. 

About two weeks later, in another setting entirely, someone mentioned how much he'd liked the card he had of this painting. Yes, I agreed, it was popular. Especially now that Wonder Woman had been a popular movie, as well. "Was it still available?", he asked.

painting by Janet Strayer www.janetstrayer.com

Whoa!, I thought. Here we go again. I told him the story of its two previous art lovers. I guess it was a warning, and certainly not the greatest sales pitch in the world! But I really like this man and, despite wanting him to own this painting, I felt it had a history to relate.

I was delighted when he re-confirmed by saying "I know I want to buy it." Nice because it seemed like the perfect fit: he had the combined artistic sensibility, humour, and  generosity of spirit to enjoy it fully. This time, it was a final sale for Wonder Woman & Superboy.

This is a painting that pays homage to two periods in art history that revered the human figure: the European Renaissance and North American Classic Comic Book Art. Set in the traditional Madonna-Child pose,Wonder Woman and Superboy are pop representations of the abiding power of iconic imagery. Technically, as well, blending modern acrylics (pop art) with traditional gold leaf and pose helps link the centuries and merges the reverential with popular cultural forms -- a humanistic approach. 

Wonder Woman & Superboy are now where they belong.  I appreciate it. And I hope you appreciate this story of its journey.  

More Creative Life News

You can read and see more about creative life, travels, tips and creative adventures by this itinerant artist at Creative Life News at https://www.janetstrayer.com

Regards, Janet 

 

PRISM and FLOW: A New Venture

Suspension of Time, painting by Janet Strayer, Flow series

It's exciting news:
Next weekend is the opening of PRISM, a new showplace for art on Saturna Island. It's right near the ferry/sea-plane dock, so it will be easy for tourists as well as residents to stop in and browse.

Still a retreat and a haven of small island lifestyle for those who wish it so, Saturna (the southern-most of the Gulf Islands) has now become even more of a tourist destination with its dedicated whale-watching and marine educational focus (see SIMRES, etc.), newly developed campgrounds, kayaking, bicycling, and picturesque B&B's.

 And here is  PRISM's window view, and the same and from outdoors (standing on the nearby pub's outdoor  deck).

PRISM is a lovely little addition to the multi-talented Saturna art scene comprising painters, ceramacists, weavers, fiber-artists, and photographers (see ArtSaturna). PRISM is my new site, recently renovated, with a gorgeous view of the water and shoreline. You can see the sail boats,  pleasure craft and fishing boats, and even the ferries coming and going, as well as the sea-planes.

I'll be hosting the PRISM, and it will be open this spring and summer during weekends 11am-5pm, and by appointment on Mondays and Fridays.

Earth Dances with Sea, painting by Janet Strayer Flow series

My opening show, aptly entitled Flow, consists of all new, never before seen, paintings that are rich in flowing movement and interacting color. I've been working truly, madly, deeply, and much of the time happily to create them over the past 8 months.

Like flowing currents in the Earth's natural environment, these paint-flows interact with human kinetic energy and gesture to create irregularly beautiful patterns. Brilliant colors, cellular structures and lace-like details result from the interaction of different paint densities that are artistically controlled to an intuitive extent and layered for artistic effect.

Tectonic Shifts, painting by Janet Strayer, Flow series

Using mixed materials creates a free-flowing contour that follows the material flow of paint from its traditionally confined surface (canvas or wood panel) to more indeterminate forms that spill off the rectilinear and into the organic. A bit of a metaphor for the act of painting too.

Connecting Green, painting (acrylic, canvas, mixed media) by Janet Strayer, Flow Series

Come if you can. Both Saturna Island and the PRISM show will surprise and delight you!


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Ptarmigan on Saturna Island

Not what you may be thinking. Not the bird, but the Ptarmigan Society for music, theater and art focusing on Artists on the Gulf Islands (see link). 

They invited me to be the featured visual artist for a workshop given on Saturna this Saturday, April 8. The morning limbers up the limbs with contemporary dance and hoop movements, led by Lindsay Landry.  After that, the afternoon limbers up the mind with excursions into visual creativity, led by me.

Altogether, should be fun for body and mind. Join us if you can. 

More Creative Life News

You can read and see more about creative life, travels, tips and creative adventures by this itinerant artist at Creative Life News at https://www.janetstrayer.com

Regards, Janet