Norman Perryman: A Life Painting Music
Excerpts from a memoir
Friday, 20 January 2023
Dancing rhythms in landscape
Thursday, 24 November 2022
Ageing optimistically, like Hokusai
As I ponder old-age and the remaining creative time I may very well have, I am greatly encouraged by the words of the famous Japanese artist and printmaker Hokusai (1760-1849) : “From the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist…and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention...If I go on trying...at one hundred and forty or more...I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive". Wow, what an example!
This woodblock print (26 x 38 cm.,1830) The Great Wave off Kangawa is Hokusai's best-known work and the first in his series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. He was then already seventy and this iconic work soon became probably the most reproduced image in the history of art.
While Mount Fuji is calmly placed asymmetrically in the distance, the fishing-boats might appear to be waging a losing battle against the claws of those huge ominous waves. Or are they successfully cleaving their way through the irresistible forces of nature? It's an endless discussion.
Facilitated by Dutch traders, Japanese prints and design flooded Europe, the movement entitled Japonisme inspired artists like Van Gogh, Monet (the Giverny Garden) and composers like Debussy (La Mer), Čiurlionis (The Sea) and many others. The coloured outlines of shapes in Van Gogh's paintings were probably influenced by the characteristics of woodblock prints. My own fluid watercolours were certainly influenced by Japanese art, especially since I travelled there in 1984. So it was so natural that I should be asked to paint live kinetic images to the music of Toshio Hosokawa with the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra: "Meditation for the victims of the Tsunami 11/3/11".
Tuesday, 8 November 2022
Soldiers' Mass
Friday, 28 October 2022
The blind man on the train
I felt as stupid as George W. Bush must have felt, after he spontaneously waved to Stevie Wonder. I had to force myself to abandon all my arty clichés and to search for alternative descriptors linked to our feelings for hot and cold, our senses of space, taste and in particular, the sounds of colour. Now he was in his element. He was a piano-tuner.
We found each other through my Synesthesia and the composer Scriabin, who shared this sensation. I could enthuse about the shimmering blue-green of a high F# and he was with me, shivering in delight; or the warm bath of burnt sienna drawn from a B♭- he snuggled down into his overcoat; or the khaki of a D#, hesitating somewhere between the taste of golden syrup and olives, before moving on to E major juicy apple green - his gestures reflected that transition. We had found a common language!
He could also "hear" the squelchy or rasping drag of my brush, making contact with or lifting off the paper at various speeds, dancing in all directions, He sensed abstract forms beginning to emerge from my choreography. Ha! Now we had both form and colour.
Overlapping fluid colours painted live to the chords of Cloches d'adieu... by Tristan Murail, played together with pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard in Aldeburgh, Helsinki and Salzburg
After the train had pulled into Victoria Station and we had parted company, I hoped that perhaps been able to offer this blind man enough for his imagination to complete a work of art with all the elements of a continuous painting – a painting that would sing and that he could accompany at the piano.