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,   

 

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 

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