The joys of teaching

An old master enjoys teaching again

After many years away from teaching, it gave me much pleasure to teach a master class last week for an international group of twelve students of the Amsterdam Conservatorium. I discovered that a long teaching experience sharing your personal passions and convictions never leaves you, it becomes second nature. 

They crammed into my small studio, so that I could avoid the chore of schlepping my overhead projectors, paints and other gear across town. It was thrilling to see such lively intelligent students taking in every word and keeping me on my toes with bright questions. We started with a potted history of the concepts of Gesamtkunstwerk and synaesthesia, moving quickly from Wagner, Scriabin, Kandinsky, Walt Disney (Fantasia) and Frank Zappa to Perryman, all artists obsessed with bringing together various visual arts and music to create one unique multi-disciplinary art form.

I pulled out a few watercolours to show how, over the years, I had moved from painting illusions of movement and music in watercolour on paper, to choreographing kinetic paintings on the glass plates of my overhead projectors, where the coloured inks literally keep moving. I began to experiment with kinetic painting in 1973, while teaching Art at a very proper Swiss private school, Aiglon College. At exactly the same time the audiences of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention were hallucinating to the fluid psychedelic colours of the Joshua White Show in New York. My preference was to combine my painting skills with classical music as an aid to meditation, without any need to enhance the experience with substances.

Ken-Ichiro Kobayashi conducting Debussy with the Netherlands Philharmonic, 

watercolour 70 x 50 cm, 1989. Basses and celli top left; below them percussion and woodwinds; bottom right the strings.

A sequence of kinetic painting towards the end of Scriabin's Prometheus/Poem of Fire. Click this link for the story of that Brussels performance in 2013).

Amazed and delighted groups of students experimenting for their one-minute performance on my overhead-projectors.

This was my assignment: paint me a phrase of any five notes: show me what colour they are, in which direction they are moving, how fast, are they hard edged or a soft flow, spaced or close, and so on. An impossible challenge for one session - even a one-week course wouldn't give you enough time to practise. I've been practising this for forty years and still learning! But they enjoyed getting their toes wet.

You couldn't make it?

You couldn't make it? A glimpse of what you missed.

It was a cold night on February 4th, with icy roads and a flu epidemic, but our try-out of the programme Nightfall, (kinetic painting with the Ebonit Saxophone Quartet) in the Amsterdam Conservatorium was warmly received by over a hundred enthusiasts. 

For those who couldn't make it, three snapshots from Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ. Here's a 4 min. montage from the performance to tempt you to watch out for the next performance; and the link to the blog I wrote when preparing for this concert. We'll be back!

Scribbles on the studio wall

Scribbles on my studio wall

We all keep jottings, ideas gathered here and there, stockpiled for inspiration, for the desperate days. Reminders to self: keep in mind when composing a picture, or designing the choreography of my kinetic painting. Wise words, floating across space and time from years gone by, these still speak to me.

Are they notes from books on calligraphy, Zen, Aikido, action painting? Fragments of advice for visual artists, authors, spiritual idealists? I can't remember. Each one is worth a whole discussion, or a hour's meditation before starting work. 

Thank you, whoever the authors were.

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Gazing at pain

Gazing at pain: Haydn's "Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross"

The slow steady rhythm of Joseph Haydn's profound music, the sense of impending doom, is with me day after day in the studio, as I create kinetic paintings to three of the seven "sonatas" from The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross. There's no going back - this man's fate is sealed. Self-evident as you watch the painfully slow flow of my descending colours on screen. Rehearsing this tragic event and this music again and again, as I prepare for my next concert, is an emotionally draining process. That's the way I work - identifying emotionally with the subject and in this case also emotionally revisiting the Christian faith I grew up with. I must confess that I still find it painful when friends hasten to tell me that "of course" this didn't really happen. But however sure of this they are, the point is - in the performance of my abstract kinetic art form right now - it really does happen - a lonely emotional experience invoked by moving colours and terribly haunting music. Oh, man!

Sonata 1: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do"

The seven "words" are actually seven phrases spoken by Jesus as he hung dying for hours on the cross (as recorded in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John). Whether you believe them or not, these literary jewels reflect compassion, an intense awareness of the human predicament, idealistic endurance, despair - all vivid soundbites from an iconic event that for better and for worse had worldwide repercussions. And it inspired thousands of artists and musicians. The crucifixion of Jesus Christ was physically horrible in itself. Add to that the extraordinary spiritual message (expressed by this person until his last gasp), set this to music, and we have a drama that still grabs you, even these days, accustomed as we are to the media horror-stories of torture and death. 

Sonata 3: "Woman, behold, thy son; son, behold thy mother"

The talented Ebonit Saxophone Quartet will be playing Haydn's own quartet arrangement of this work, as part of our programme Nightfall. Luke recorded that when Jesus died "the sun failed. Darkness covered the whole land". A unique "Nightfall". According to Haydn, his Spanish patrons in 1785 intended this work to be performed in a totally darkened space, with one dramatic illumination. Well, what could be more appropriate today, than to perform this with the coloured illuminations of my overhead projectors in the darkened Bernard Haitink Hall of the Amsterdam Conservatorium. One way or another, we are all desperately in need of enlightenment.

Sonata 6: "It is finished"

The classic question remains: how is it that through the arts this subject can be transformed in such a way that we are inspired and enlightened? Why does one of Haydn's greatest works inspire me to dig so deeply into my artistic soul, and find it so satisfying? You tell me, after the concert, over a free drink. It could be a long discussion!

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This is a free concert (no reservations necessary) on February 4th at 8pm. Amsterdam Conservatorium. The seven works in our programme: Shostakovich, Haydn, Reger, Haydn, Webern, Haydn, Sibelius.