Me Be

The Bird and the Bees

The canary in the coal mine
When she stops singing
Lives are on the line
None more so than hers

I never thought I’d live to see music stop
And I know it never truly did
Wherever there are humans
There is music
And yet
It went oddly quiet for a time
Times and half a time
So quiet that the site and sound
Of a piano being played in the street
Held us in tears

How much could a canary cost
Back in the days when
Carbon monoxide sensors did not exist?
It could not have been much
And yet some engineer with a heart
Built a box with the sole purpose
Of reviving unconscious canaries
In an act of rather clever love
Because the cost of a life
Is never proportional to its worth

Keep singing, songbird

—
Painted for (and during) the Redwood Coast Music Festival.

For these paintings I am always thinking about music and how to portray it visually.

The foundation for me is the connection to water, as the medium through which waves travel in a form relatable to the scale of the human body. We see individual waves traversing the ocean and breaking upon a shore, where we can even immerse ourselves and be propelled by the energy contained in one single wave.

Music consists of waves upon waves. Sound-waves that vibrate our eardrums, the beat of the drum that moves our bodies in rhythms.

For this piece I got to thinking about music theory and the madmen that make sense of notes and octaves and circles of fifths and mathematical harmonies far beyond what my simple mind can process. Coltrane came to mind with his famous napkin sketch. When I saw his sketch I immediately saw bees arranged around the circle and I knew I would work his sketch into this painting.

To offset the cold and impenetrable conceptuality of Coltrane’s sketch I returned to pondering the organic origins of music and arrived at the songbird. I chose a canary for its color and for its history as an icon of singing birds.

And all life comes from water, so there is something beautiful in thinking of music as the love-child of water and math. That’s where the stars come in, marking points on the sine-wave paths of the dancing bees. It’s all connected.

The Redwood Coast Music Festival nearly ended due to covid era restrictions where each time the event was planned another wave of outbreaks hit the area and forced cancellations, much was spent on these events that never happened.

The symbol of the canary in the coalmine comes to mind. When the music stops, we’re in trouble. And we were.

When I searched for reference material about canaries in coal mines I came across an invention from a coal miner- essentially a sealed metal box with an oxygen canister into which the unconscious canary could be revived. Some notes say this was for economic reasons, but my mind cannot wrap around a canary costing enough to profit-minded miners that these engineered boxes would be a financial benefit to the bottom line. I declare those metal and glass life chambers an act of love, and so included a reference to them with the screws around the metal border of the painting..

And there you have it. The Bird and the Bees…

Posted on by

From Seed to Flower and Back Again

My mother was a greenhouse
She birthed a million babies
And her grandchildren
See the world now
From the wings of honeybees

—

Painted for the Humboldt Botanical Gardens, 2023
The Gardens are a beautiful place and each year they invite a bunch of artists to come and paint on the grounds. They feed us sandwiches and even serve us beers. Each year I walk around for 40 minutes grumbling about how in the world am I supposed to paint here, where there is no horizon, no ocean, no rolling waves… just fields of complicated colors all up in your face everywhere you look. And then I end up finding someone nice to sit beside and chat with while painting something like this. It really is a delightful day and I’m glad to be invited.

Posted on by

Internal Communications

There is a stage every painting I create goes through at the very beginning that I fall in love with almost every time. It’s not the polished end-game, it’s the initial quick sketch with the first few thin washes of color applied. There is something about that first reaction to the scene before me that happens almost by itself. It is purely joyful to me. After that stage I usually begin the arduous stage of building, building, building layer upon layer of heavier and heavier paint, just pushing, pushing until the painting finally looks like “my work” whatever the hell that is supposed to be… all I know is that it nearly sucks the life out of everything. Oh, I like the finished results in the end, but the whole thing is a just chore to get to that place. The painting becomes only about the end result and the process become mechanical, and contains very little mystery to me after that initial sketch stage.

For the last several years I’ve been grinding against this process, pushing painting after painting through the corridors of strained conformity to an expected standard of completion.

Until this one.

At Wine by the Sea this year I arrived fresh off a bender of live painting all weekend at the Redwood Coast Music Festival, sneaking in a quick break from painting there to come out to this wonderful event and… paint some more. With more live music! I am seriously the most spoiled artist in the world sometimes. After my initial sketch was laid out (with all the joy I previously mentioned) I went on a beer run (about 12 steps from my easel) and when I returned I saw the sketch just sitting there in its joyful glory, not asking for anything of me. This is awkward. I tried to tell it that I was at an event, this was a fundraiser, and I was expected to deliver something more, but this fun little sketch was a stubborn bugger, just sitting there all beautiful and in need of nothing. Reminded me of my wife. I realize this is not an argument I can win. In fact it’s probably not one I should even be having.

So I step away and discuss the matter with some lovely guests of the event, who showed themselves loyal friends and took my side in the matter, and yet… there she was, smiling in the misty breeze, entirely sure of herself. Dang. How can she do this to me? As I continued mulling over my problems to friends and strangers alike, something unusual happened. I heard myself. And upon hearing myself deliberating whether to push this painting that I love into becoming something it isn’t (for many great reasons, mind you), I couldn’t help but to see the obvious. There isn’t an artist in the world that I would advise continuing to push their work past it’s joyful place for the sake of living up to some external standard- real or imagined. No way.

You must listen to your work.
(and your wife)
And honor them both.

So that is what I chose.

Posted on by

Listen to Her

Another one for the Music People. You know who you are. For the last few years I’ve been honored to paint the official artwork for the Redwood Coast Music Festival.  
  
Each year I put some thought (typically at the last minute) into just what this mysterious magic called music is all about. Where’d it come from? Why is it what it is?  
  
I’ve always connected water to music. I think most of us have at some level. Rhythm, flow, and all that. All of my paintings for them have explored that connection.  
  
As I pondered what to do for this one, I started thinking of the word itself. “Music” comes from the Muses, those divine goddess ladies that lured perfectly ordinary men into accidentally writing poetry, or making music, or art, or nearly any other creative endeavor undertaken by humans to this day.   
  
One account I came across explained the three original muses were all born of Memory, who was a goddess lady herself… (but no can remember who the dad was, which is ironic when you think about it since he married a woman who was the spiritual embodiment of Memory). Their first daughter was associated with the movement of water. The second with practice. And the third with the human voice.  
  
I’m no Greek scholar, but… Memory, Practice, the Movement of Water, and the Human Voice? Yep, sounds like the birth of music to me.   
  
So here she is, Mother Memory herself observing the movement of water, her mind well practiced in the movement of the stars like the frets on a stringed instrument, as the notes rise up in her vocal chords about to give birth to the very first song.  
  
Don’t quote me on any of this.  
  

Posted on by

Music of the Spheres

The astronomy app on my phone said there would be some cool things happening in the sky that night, just after the rise of the full moon. An alignment of planets.

The app never said anything about the 360° Piano Sphere hovering over the waters beneath the alignment though.

And it just goes to show, you can’t trust these stupid phones.

Posted on by