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Dance party where the brilliant Lisa Ornstein played fiddle and led the band. This photo was taken at ISO 1600, f3.5, 1/10th of a second. Then I fussed over it in photoshop for awhile.
Life has been a whirl, consumed by daily tasks that impinge my art practice. It’s been a long while since I’ve posted.
It’s not that I haven’t been lifting pencil and brush. I have been, but most of what I’ve created is not for public consumption.
I’ve been incubating. I’ve also been learning a few new skills. I’m taking a beginning photography class and finally learning to use my fancy camera after owning it for 2 years. At the same time I took a landscape painting class. Yes, more classes. I know I said I wasn’t going to take any classes for a while, but then a while passed. And when these two classes presented themselves I couldn’t refuse.
The photography class has been fun, and now I know where the on/off button is located, and why it has three clicks. And instead of putting the camera on automatic, I make choices about the geometry all the little dials form. Getting the little orbiting concepts of ISO, f-stop, and shutter speed aligned well enough to create a perfect crystalline photo is darn hard. I still don’t understand white balance, but I know these things take time.
It’s a good thing I don’t have a television.
This portrait is on Arches print paper. I inherited this beautiful paper from a friend whose father was an artist. He’d passed a long time ago, and when they finally cleared out his workshop, they found a stack of this lovely paper that probably dates back to the 60′s. Isn’t that an artist’s fantasy—to find beautiful, antique paper from a time when craftsmanship still ruled the day?
I love to draw on this paper, and small sizes worked okay with watercolor. But this painting is big—a full sheet of paper, 22X30—and there were some issues.
Paper for letterpress printing has less sizing than watercolor paper, which makes the press paper lovely and soft, but without the sizing to protect it, the paper sucks up the paint. Plus, even though I stretched it and stapled it firmly onto a board, when the paper got wet, it got all floppy like a wet cotton sheet. But it dries nice and flat. The painting is still on it’s stretcher board, and I may rework it a bit.
This was painted before I took the Ted Nuttall workshop. I now refer to this as my BT (before Ted) style. Next post, I”ll show you my AT (after Ted) style. Very different.
More about sizing
http://www.arts-in-company.com/paper/additives/sizing.html
http://www.trueart.info/sizing.htm
More about paper
http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/paper1.html
Box player at the Abby
A visit to Chicago would have been incomplete without attending an Irish session. The Chicago Irish music scene is legendary. My fiddler said this was the one thing he really, really, really wanted to do. I, of course, was not against this idea.
We found the Abby, where, when we walked through the door, we were astounded by the most amazing whistle playing.
It was Laurence Nugent, a top Irish whistle and flute player. Pretty cool.
At the Abby
If I’m shy about drawing in public, sometimes I’m even more shy about playing music. I couldn’t see taking my whistle out and squawking around on it like a wounded ostrich when there were musicians who were roaring like lions. Instead, I sat at a table, had a beer, and listened to ripping reels, jigs, and hornpipes while I painted. Listeners are an important part of a session too!
I leave you with this video.
- Laurence Nugent
The text says: "A Listening tune should be like a wonderful day where everything is as fresh and clean as when the Shaper shaped it."
Today we went to the Santa Clara Valley Fiddlers Association to hear fiddler Sarah Kirton play her hardingfele. It was sheer magic.
The hardingfele, or hardanger fiddle, is a traditional instrument of Norway. It’s got 4 strings stretched across the top of the instrument, like a regular fiddle, but beneath those strings are 4 more strings that buzz and moan in sympathy when the top strings are played. The music is other-worldly. When I hear it, I think of ice goddesses, snow fields, midnight suns, birch trees in brilliant green meadows.
If the northern lights played music, it would be on the hardingfele.
In the Bay Area we gab ceaselessly about diversity, and yet, most people only really listen to music presented to them by mainstream radio; they don’t know that there is a whole world of music out there that isn’t just Lady Gaga and Justin Beiber. It’s the musical equivalent of eating at only McDonalds when you live 2 blocks from a wonderful street where every restaurant serves food from a different country . If you never go down that street, you never even know that there are other foods.
If you want to taste some Norwegian hardingele music, you might start at the Hardanger Fiddle Association of America. There are some sound files to give you an idea of what this wonderful and mysterious music sounds like. And there’s a radio show about the fiddle (Sarah’s in it!) here.
And you might want to explore some of the fabulous musical menus that the world has to offer. Who knows? There might be a hardingele fiddler living right next door to you!
I’ve been working on this watercolor of my friend, Cyndi, holding her fiddle. Finally it’s finished (oops, except for strings. I’m going to add those using chalk).
I don’t have much to say about it right now, except that it took me longer than I expected.
A few weekends ago I attended a music party in the mountains, at the ranch of long time friends who are musicians and dancers. The weekend was filled with music (rather than painting) and dancing (rather than housework or laundry).
I don’t mean we had concerts, where a few people sat on a stage and entertained us, as if they were the experts and we were the consumers. I mean we played music and danced. All of us participated.
This was conversational music. We spoke to each other using the language of jigs, reels, waltzes, and hornpipes. The accent was sometimes Irish, sometimes American, sometimes Swedish, French Canadian, or Blues. But we understood each other, or tried to understand each other, and respond in kind.
On Sunday morning some of us got together and sang old American religious tunes, gospel, and modern American Folk music.
On the long drive home I reflected that it would be very hard to attend a non-music party. I’m not sure I remember how to behave at a party where people don’t pull out fiddles, flutes, accordions, dulcimers, bagpipes, and guitars and speak to each other in the pleasant tones of a tune.
Music is communication, and can be a two-way conversation. When I pick up my flute, I’m not practicing a tune, I’m learning how to speak.
I was lucky enough to have a front row seat and plenty of light, so out came the sketchbook. How much happier could I be than to listen to amazing music while drawing the amazing musicians making said music?
Last night we heard the trio Veretski Pass play their Klezmer Shul, a beautiful piece of music that combines Jewish sacred and secular music of Eastern Europe (and maybe some “co-territorial” music from other cultures).
In a talk with the audience after, the fiddler Cookie Segelstien (oh, alright, she’s a violinist, if you want to reference her work in the classical world. As if being an amazing Klezmer fiddler isn’t enough) told us that there used to be, a long time ago, special shuls (houses of worship) dedicated to specific tradesmen. There were shuls for builders, and tailors, and, they think, there were shuls for musicians. Cookie said, “we asked the question, in that light, what kind of music would Klezmer musicians jam on?”
The music was terrific. It was haunting, and joyful, and all the things you’d expect from three amazingly gifted musicians mining the very roots of their musical souls. The Klezmer Shul is what happens when classically trained musicans cross over into folk music and create something new and wonderful.
I loved what I heard last night, but it was more academically inclined (not that this is a bad thing, mind you). It’s just that the kind of music in the clip below makes my heart dance. This video clip is pure Klezmer.
I’m hoping we’ll have some of this music in the house soon. My own fiddler has been away these last two days, attending Klezmer workshops at the KlezCalifornia yiddish Culture Festival at Congregation Etz Chayim in Palo Alto. I would have loved to join in the fun, but I just can’t take on another hobby right now. But I’m hoping he brings home some tunes.
Boxwood Flute © 2009 Margaret Sloan
This painting is a portrait of a young woman I met at Friday Harbor Irish Music Camp. Her flute was made of boxwood, which has a tendency to warp. Hers was bent in a charming shape. But, she said, it hadn’t really made any difference in how it played. It was a sweet-toned flute, and fit her playing style very well.
It took me a while to finish this painting, with many sketches and smaller studies. I started off rather badly; the night I began I was exhausted, and there was loud, very interesting music playing in the classroom. I have a really hard time working when music is playing, because my brain stands up and says, hey! There’s music going on over here that you need to come listen to right now! It’s one of the things I know about how my brain works. I can’t have music playing when I’m painting or drawing.
I’ve been working on this drawing of Catherine McEvoy for my watercolor class. It’s been problematic because my photo reference is so bad. I took it in class last year at Friday Harbor Irish Music Camp. Really, the photo is mostly just the idea for the painting, and a brief reference for Catherine’s face.
My teacher, Steve Curl, brought up something that has helped me with the drawing. “Think about the angles,” he said. “That will give you the dynamism you need to show the intensity the has when she plays the flute.” Steve is a musician as well as a painter, and right off he recognized the dynamic force with which Catherine plays the flute. That force is what I’m trying to capture.
So I put the drawing in Adobe Illustrator and picked out the angles and the line of action to better understand the drawing. The purple lines are the dominant angles, the light blue lines secondary, and the orange lines are the lines of action. I still don’t have it quite right. I’ll have to spend some time in front of a mirror with a flute (holding it backwards since Catherine plays left-handed) in order to understand the pose. It’s times like these I wish I could afford a model. And I’ll have to spend some more time watching Youtube videos of Catherine. Darn.
This fiddle I saw at the Good Old Fashioned Bluegrass Festival. The lady bought it in the 1970s. She thought it was a Vuillaume. Maybe.
The name Vuillaume could mean anything. It’s like finding a fiddle in your grandmother’s attic, peering through the f-hole and seeing a Stradivarius label. Probably not a real Strad. Lots of people have made lots of money selling instruments with phony labels. And musicians tend to give their instruments distinguished pedigrees.
But whatever this fiddle’s ancestry, it is a lovely piece of work, with a beautifully carved scroll, and cunning carved corners on the back, and Celtic-looking purfling. The scroll does place it sometime during the 19th or early 20th century—a time when ornamentation was popular on all things, and ornamented scrolls decked out many fiddles.
I’m not a violin connoisseur, so I didn’t know enough then to look closely at the painting on the back to see if it is inlay, painting, or both.
The most important things about a fiddle are how it feels when you play it, and how it sounds. An instrument can have the beauty of Grace Kelly, but if it shrieks like a toothless angry old witch, then it’s of no use.
The owner of this fiddle treated it with the casual attention you’d give a favored pet. It sat next to her as she sat listening to the music. She carried it around, cradled in her arms. She loved it. She said it had a great sound.
That’s all that’s important.
Painting and drawing and playing tunes are the things that make life real, They are what makes my life matter. These, and berry pie.
