Elgar's Dream & Yehudi Menuhin

Elgar's Dream & Yehudi Menuhin

"Elgar's Dream", watercolour triptych 158 x 203 cm. 1996 

I have an affinity with water - having grown up virtually on the banks of the English River Severn that flows past Worcester Cathedral (right) and the Malvern Hills (left), where Edward Elgar wrote "The Dream of Gerontius" in 1900.  

The morning after my February CBSO performance of The Sea (M.K.Čiurlionis) at Birmingham Symphony Hall, the adrenaline was still flowing (or whatever adrenaline does), so I let myself be persuaded to give my extended family a guided tour of a number of my watercolour paintings of great musicians in the Symphony Hall Collection. The paintings hang in the Director's Lounge and the corridors leading to the backstage dressing-rooms that are only accessible to VIPs and performing artists. The first of thirty-one paintings was made in 1990, yet my family - still in town after the concert - had never seen the originals before! So I had many anecdotes to tell on the making of these works, exciting, sad, with precious memories of my subjects' reactions - it was great to be able to share some of these with the family.

But the largest watercolour I have ever painted hangs in the first floor foyer. I gave it the form of a triptych because of the limited measurements of watercolour paper. The three parts are deliberately hung to float away from the background. My Elgar's Dream was painted with many tears in 1996, soon after the death of my wife and mother of my children, the cellist Vivian King. 

Commissioned by Robin and Jayne Cadbury, it was unveiled by Yehudi Menuhin in October 1996. We shared the presentation, and then speaking of his own memories of Edward Elgar, and of having conducted this work himself, Yehudi said: “There isn’t a note in this painting that contradicts Elgar’s music and what I remember of Sir Edward”. Here's the precious amateur video made by Will Blagburn - a link to that memorable occasion. It was the last time that I could enjoy such warm contact with this wonderful musician and dear friend, who left us on March 12th.1999.

Yehudi Menuhin unveils "Elgar's Dream"

Through music, Elgar made the dream of the dying Gerontius his own. He considered this composition to be one of his best. This epic drama for chorus, soloists and full orchestra is pure theatre, beautifully evoking the anxieties, doubts and weariness of Gerontius (geron: Greek for old man) and then his ultimate acceptance and state of peace.

The final angelic message set to a soothing melody is deeply moving:

Softly and gently, dearly ransomed soul,

In my loving arms I now enfold thee.....

I poise thee, and I lower thee, and hold thee,

And carefully I dip thee in the lake....

Sinking deep, deeper into the dim distance.

All highly paintable. Even though I find the dogma in most of the lyrics a bit hard to swallow, I feel for this guy. In my painting you will recognise my semi-abstract "loving arms" cradling the pallid Gerontius above the flow of music and the "devils" in the reeds, clamouring for his soul. But apart from the figurative elements of my story-telling, I hope that the colours, structure and abstract dynamics of the painting will reflect and echo the music itself.

On the morning of the guided tour, as I explained this painting and my sources of inspiration to the family, young and old, the designer/image-maker Rebecca Foster brilliantly seized the opportunity to create her own triptych, converting her images to black and white and manipulating the tonalities so that uncannily I became one with my own watercolour. Am I cradling my dying self or am I lowering myself into the depths? I had no idea at the time that I was figuring in my own painting!

Little did Rebecca know that my own wishes are that when my time comes, my ashes be strewn, if not in the River Severn, then in the River Amstel (nearer to my present home), into which small bottles of the very same organic transparent colours that I have used in performances for many years will then be poured, so that I become part of one last continuous fluid lyrical painting that carries me out to sea, to be united with nature. My motto has always been - Go with the flow......

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Genius

Genius

That beautifully poetic line in the Bible comes to mind, an introduction to the very beginning of creation: "Darkness was upon the face of the deep. The spirit (breath) of God moved over the surface of the waters. He said: 'Let there be light' ". 

With all due respect, in a rather more modest approximation of this dynamic action, today I'm breathing onto my liquid organic watercolours, to spread them over the glass plates of my overhead projectors in my studio, practising how to breathe in synch with the winds and brush-stroke with the strings of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. We shall come together in a Genius Loci (meaning the spirit of a special place), in the magnificent Symphony Hall of course, but more especially in a new shared awareness. For the first time, the whole orchestra and I will tap into the genius of a fellow spirit: artist/composer M.K.Čiurlionis, in a unique audio-visual confluence inspired by his compatriot, Music Director Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla as she conducts the symphonic poem The Sea on February 16th. 

The author, philosopher and poet David Whyte*, in his moving book Consolations, suggests that "genius" is not simply a platform of achievement, arrived at through accomplishment. It is to find oneself in the crossing point, he writes...at a confluence of inherited flows...the meeting place of our particular body meeting all other bodies, corporal and elemental: a body breathed over by the wind.......

*I apologise to David for disfiguring the flow of his thought-provoking writing. (Read that Book!). I am deeply indebted to him for these thoughts and much more.

(Above) a few more "stills", awaiting their moment of live creation through my lyrical kinetic painting with the CBSO on February 16th. in Birmingham Symphony Hall. Take a deep breath, then let's take the plunge.

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Scroll down for earlier blogs on this exciting project.

The joy of fluid lyrical painting

The joy of fluid lyrical painting 

Of course you know that lyrics are the words to a song. But did you know that lyrical paintings can sing without words and elevate you emotionally? The continuous flow of my kinetic colours is like a song, the tones fluctuating with the help of my instruments (my brushes). As they visualise the rhythms of this music for you on screen, this extraordinary partnership offers you an intensely lyrical experience, maybe even a sense of rhapsody.

A still from my kinetic painting to "Incantation", Part 4 of "Murmurs in the Mist of Memory" 

by Augusta Read Thomas.

Lyrical Abstraction was born of a desire to create a direct physical and sensory experience of painting, one of the many styles of painting that developed in the second half of the twentieth century in Paris and the United States, for example in Jackson Pollock's "drip and splash" painting, or the Color Field movement (poured paint and stained canvasses) pioneered by Helen Frankenthaler. Those paintings reveal an intuitive loose handling in the physical application of the paint, its sensuous organic properties and the breath or energy of the artist in action. You sense their exalted state as they exhale, following the energy of the liquid as it takes on a life of its own. Jackson Pollock listened to jazz for hours, before he walked across his canvasses to make his drip paintings. Click on the link to the PBS video of Jackson Pollock to see the photos and hear the story of the creative act as a kind of performance art. Those huge canvasses now hang on museum walls and still give you some impression of the action, but as you gaze at them, you realise that you've actually come too late. The action has become frozen, fixed on canvas and framed - in a form that is commercially very profitable. 

                

                            

 Jackson Pollock in action. Photo By Martha Holmes/The LIFE Premium Collection/Getty Images

By contrast, my own lyrical moving painting only exists in "real time": an ephemeral performance-art form, its existence determined by the length of the music. When the music stops, it disappears, gone for ever. A truly unique experience for the cost of a mere concert ticket. Admittedly you can put it on video, but the surprise and excitement of the original performance will never be the same. The other feature of my own sort of "lyrical painting" is that is not vaguely inspired by the music in some general way. It's specifically choreographed to each piece of music. Although it is often extremely dynamic, unlike Pollock's work it will likely convey you gently to a more peaceful world.

Here's the Link to the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's video of my brief introduction to my painting to The Sea by Čiurlionis. 

Both the dream-like mystical paintings of the Lithuanian composer M.K. Ciurlionis (1875-1911) and his poetic music express emotional torment and a longing for a state of spiritual ecstasy, of exaltation. Every colour evokes a tone that sings the praises of mother Nature. More than any other composer, his paintings and music go hand in hand, his music dying to be visualised and his paintings crying out to be performed live. Like his contemporary Alexander Scriabin with his Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus, he was already looking for a combined audio-visual art form.

I can't wait to stand on stage on February 16th. with my overhead-projector set-up, surrounded by about a hundred musicians of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, to paint/play M.K.Čiurlionis' lyrical, emotional symphonic poem The Sea (1907), my colours "singing" in an audio-visual harmony. I know this will be a deeply emotional experience for me, probably for Mirga on Lithuania's Independence Day (February 16th) and hopefully for you too.

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Link to my performance with the CBSO, in Birmingham Symphony Hall, Saturday February 16th.

More reflections on painting "The Sea"

More reflections on painting "The Sea"

I'm now hard at work choreographing a continuous painting, to be memorised and performed live in concert to the symphonic poem The Sea (1907) by the Lithuanian M.K. Čiurlionis. This masterpiece offers me perhaps the supreme opportunity to tap into the vast reservoir of Nature with my watercolour brushes, using my own natural analogue energy to propel, splash, persuade and release the flow of my fluid colours in synch with this amazing music, to share the composer's "boundless longing" for a sublime experience with Nature.
The link to my 4-minute Trailer of "The Sea" made from a studio practice session will give you an idea of what I'm talking about: 

One very early love was to paint watercolours of landscapes and seascapes on paper, usually a thoughtful search for peace and stillness, often standing outdoors in all weathers, conversing with Nature as crystals of ice would freeze my paint on the paper before it could dry. In an earlier blog Dancing Rhythms, I describe how unexpected sounds in nature have inspired compositional rhythms in my paintings. Coincidence or synchronicity?

As a student I spent hours, just for fun, balancing and walking on a slack-rope stretched between the iron girders of my nineteenth-century art-college studios. Totally focussed, I could enjoy the exhilarating tension, the sensation of standing in space suspended on a line - the line that I later habitually attached to the edges of my paintings to create an horizon. Actually, balancing in my own space became the challenge of my life, visually and literally.

                                Misty morning on Vancouver Island, 1986
I've always been fascinated by the horizon of land or sea, where at that thin meeting place of the heavens and the depths, something magical happens, whether through a single brush stroke, or by the confrontation and reaction of two pools of colour that may overlap, bleed into or repel each other. I'm often confronted with this critical line in the very flat Netherlands that have become my home and find myself asking -  is this horizon an opportunity to venture into a vast unseen world just out of sight? Or is this my last hurdle, the finishing line of life's marathon? Only to discover that as I round the dyke, there's another hurdle.

                                   Waters edge in Friesland (watercolour on paper, 1980) 

On February 16th. 2019 (the National Day of Lithuania) my performance with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla will offer me once again the opportunity to create an art work through a technique that bears my own signature: a continuous painting to music with liquid watercolours on the glass surface of overhead-projectors, to evoke the immense undulating expanse of the sea: dramatic, stormy, dreamlike, frightening, calming and refreshing, all viewed on a ten-metre wide screen behind the orchestra. I hope that the spectator/audience will feel alternately bathed, swept away or even overwhelmed with the grandeur and whimsical power of the elements of Nature. 

                                                  One giant brush - one wave

I nearly drowned in water as a boy and I've never lost the fear of drowning. How ironic that I've nevertheless learned to swim in watercolour and to take the risk to go with the flow, to battle the elements - in front of a couple of thousand spectators! 

My aesthetic statement is also a very personal spiritual exercise, a passionate quest that may have some roots in my youthful evangelical activities in a Christian church (my initiation into which was by baptism (submersion in water!), from which I long ago emerged to set off on an ongoing search for my own form of spirituality, searching for a oneness with the powers of the Cosmos - for a synergy that, after all these years, I'm best able to express in my audio-visual language - that of a painter and musician. 

Lithuania's national hero the painter/composer Čiurlionis was widely steeped in the cultural philosophies of his day and was also preoccupied with man's relation to divinity in Nature. I can identify with his Pantheistic dialogue, in his case visualised in the mystic symbolism of hundreds of paintings of landscapes, seascapes and fantastic architecture, made in the first decade of the twentieth century. Even if the complex meanings of his themes and symbols have been neglected by present-day trend-setters, during his lifetime his work was regarded as one of the precursors of European modern art. 

    Three paintings entitled The Sea Sonata, with thanks to the 

M.K.Čiurlionis National Museum of Art.

While composing The Sea, Čiurlionis wrote a poem that begins:
"Powerful sea. 
Great, infinite, boundless. 
All of the sky envelops your waves with its blue, 
While you, full of grandeur, your existence is infinite. 
The great, powerful, wonderful sea! 
Half the world is looking at you at night, 
Distant suns drown their blinking, mysterious, slumbering 

Glances in your depths, 
While you, eternal queen of giants, breath peacefully and quietly, 
You know that there is only you and nobody reigns over you".

Čiurlionis was regarded by the composer Stravinsky (who purchased one of his works) as one of the most talented of the Russian school of painting at the turn of the century. Before his untimely death in 1911 he was rapidly becoming an influential figure in the European world of art and music.  His passion was to fuse the arts into one Gesamtkunst form. 

The majority of his paintings in the National Museum of Art in Kaunas are overflowing with suggested movement, patterns and rhythms, yet these art forms are static, anchored in their frames. That's why I'm sure he would have welcomed my concept of creating my own abstract expressionist painting that literally moves continuously to his music, as I stand with my projectors right in the middle of the orchestra, breathing with every wind instrument, my brush strokes gesturing with every stroke of the bows of the strings. As in the transparent harmonies and tone colours of The Sea, my ever-changing colours are layered over each other with my analogue image-mixer in my right hand, while I paint with my left hand. So for over thirty minutes, my whole body and soul is in balance as I join Čiurlionis in search of a sublime experience.

Here is the Link to two earlier blogs with more details on how this performance on February 16th. 2019 gradually took shape. 
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*Did Čiurlionis know the Finnish composer Rautavaara - at work just across the Baltic Sea from Lithuania? Here's the Link to my performance of Rautavaara's Cantus Arcticus (Concerto for Birds & Orchestra), where synchronicity between recorded bird-song, visuals and orchestra plays a vital role. Both composers were preoccupied with synchronicity (meaningful coincidences) in the mystic patterns of life.  As it happens, the CBSO will be performing Cantus Arcticus just two nights before my performance of The Sea, as part of this season's theme: Baltic Music.