The blind man on the train

 

The blind man on the train

Around 1973, travelling on the ferry-train from Paris to Calais to London, I found myself in a compartment with a blind man. Striking up a conversation, he asked me what my work was. “A visual artist? Tell me about your work”. Alas, every sentence I started, every description was totally inadequate. “I can appreciate sculpture”, he said, moving his hands in space as he modelled the shapes and forms he “saw”. “But what is this transparent, glowing watercolour you’re talking about?” Well, er, it’s like a stained-glass window, but with white paper shining through the transparent colours. “Really? How do you experience a stained-glass window?” It turned out that he was blind from birth.

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.

                           

Scriabin: Poem of Ecstasy, 

           painting on overhead projectors with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 2010

Several years would go by before I realised that the great passion of my life would be to draw inspiration from music to create fluid kinetic paintings that have no final tangible form. Painted on overhead projectors, when they have faded to black at the end of a performance - like the music, they have gone for ever. This ephemeral art form nevertheless retains a dynamic presence in your memory, your imagination and your soul.

 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.

Scriabin: Prometheus: The Poem of Fire

painted live with the National Orchestra of Belgium in 2013

I shall never forget the challenge and joy of that conversation with the blind man in the train. How satisfying it can be to open up to a stranger and discover a common language! Perhaps a useful tip for any of us today, in a world that seems to be awash with suspicion, fear and mistrust of those different from ourselves, or those with whom we don't see eye to eye.

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P.S. This is an amended version of my blog from 2012, prompted by the joys of this year's autumn colours.

How Daniel's Hope@Home series inspired a portrait

                                                     

How Daniel's Hope@Home series 

inspired a portrait

Ever since the violinist Daniel Hope came to my Amsterdam studio in 2015 to make plans to perform music and kinetic painting together* I wanted to make a portrait of him in action. He interviewed me about the nature of my work, with our dear friend Yehudi Menuhin in the background.

The opportunity and inspiration finally presented itself when on March 25th. 2020 Daniel launched his acclaimed Hope@Home recitals, streamed daily from his living-room in Berlin during the lockdown and watched by millions. From the word go, it was clear to me that here was a priceless source of audio-visual references for a portrait-painting. I studied every one of those performances and was entranced throughout. I can finally show you the result, with my comments below.

Daniel Hope, watercolour 77 x 55 cm, 2020

It was quite a challenge to find a way to visualize Daniel's energy, warmth, enthusiasm and intense focus, all in one painting. I could have made ten! But I put together multiple impressions to show how Daniel is seriously enjoying the music, saying, with that characteristic turn of the mouth: hey, listen to this! He's a masterful communicator. His gaze also betrays a deep emotional response to this music. 

The free brushstrokes of this watercolour express Daniel's enterprise and flair, without detracting from his and my attention to detail. I've placed the outer edges of the warm picture-frame on the golden section to underline the balance of the whole. Every other element of my apparently relaxed composition directs our focus to that small area where the momentary contact of bow, fingers and strings produce beautiful music, from a musician who is completely at one with his instrument.

All my thanks, Daniel, for your ongoing inspiration.

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* We did indeed perform music and painting together in Berlin and Lübeck in 2016 to celebrate the Yehudi Menuhin Centenary. Painting live kinetic images to Ravel's "Kaddish" with Daniel and pianist Sebastian Knauer was one of the most moving experiences of my life. I also performed with Daniel's Zürich Chamber Orchestra in 2018. The theatrical highlight was undoubtedly Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale in Essen with, Daniel, Benno Schollum and Katja Riemann on June 23rd. 2018, the evening before my 85th birthday. 

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Here's the video-link to my Studio rehearsal for Ravel's "Kaddish" (piano Jacques Ammon).

Many of the Hope@Home recitals can still be found on YouTube. 

The beautiful solitude of nature

 

The beautiful solitude of nature

My pilot is flying his De Havilland Beaver seaplane close above the small islands and inlets off Vancouver Island, bending and weaving his route northward, with only an occasional tiny ferryboat below. Sitting in the cockpit with a sketchbook on my lap, I'm sketching frantically with a thick pencil, breathless with the beauty of this unique viewpoint, one that changes every second. We are alone, communing with nature. Westward is the vast Pacific. I feel so small and intensely aware of the ephemeral nature of human life on our beautiful planet.

In the summer of 1988 I was on Vancouver Island to give workshops. I stayed at the chalet of my dear friend, the excellent Victoria artist and art educator Fleming Jorgensen. He got me that flight over the islands. (I was not to know that his colleague, the watercolour artist Toni Onley, who flew his own sea-plane in search of inspiration, was later to crash into the deep).

In my Amsterdam studio, I recently rediscovered those urgent sketches made thirty-four years ago and was overcome by acute nostalgia. So I decided to re-live my amazing experience in those ever-changing aerial views of nature, in the form of two semi-abstract watercolours. By freely creating islands of colour nestling in the deeps and shallows, I rediscovered the beautiful solitude of nature. I dared to let my watercolours flow and bleed organically, naturally forming their own textures and patterns. I heard the floating sounds of music: woodwinds, shakuhachi, bass saxophone and Tan Dun's water percussion. 

  Solitude above Vancouver Islands, watercolour, 43 x 62 cm. 2022

In the second painting my tiny seaplane further explores those monumental peaks and depths. We briefly touched down at the foot of the background peak for a ten-second splash in that icy waterfall. That really took my breath away!

Exploring heights and depths of Vancouver islands, watercolour 66 x 46 cm, 2022

                                                                    

 

 

A fond farewell to my piano

In 1974 I lived in Geneva, Switzerland and I was looking for a cellist to participate in a film for Télévision Suisse Romande featuring my kinetic painting with music and dance. Someone mentioned the American cellist Vivian King, who was then studying with the great Pierre Fournier. We made an appointment. I was about to ring Vivian's doorbell when I heard the sound of the Bach's Cello Suite Nr. 2.  I was enchanted.

In Vivian's apartment I noticed a rather nice Zimmermann piano. Curious, I tried a couple of bars of a Beethoven sonata. Oh, Vivian said - you're also a musician! Well, that's a long story. That was the beginning of twenty-one years of making music together.

In 1978 we settled in Amsterdam, near the Concertgebouw, where Vivian began to play regularly. The piano was hauled up (with ropes!) to our fourth floor apartment and that's where our sons both learned to play the piano.

Vivian and Norman playing Francœur's Adagio for BBC

When in 1993 BBC Television was visiting to make a documentary about my life making kinetic images to music, Director Jonathan Fulford said spontaneously: "Hey, why don't you guys just play something together?" Oh no! I had been so busy working in the UK and Amsterdam on the film "Concerto for Paintbrush and Orchestra" with Simon Rattle that I hadn't touched the piano for months. But Vivian said "Ah, why don't we do the first Movement of the Sonata by François Francœur. She knew it by heart and somehow, with just two takes, I managed to get through it. 

Vivian was already ill with acute leukaemia and tragically, she died three years later at 51. Her cello was acquired by our dear friend, the cellist Edith Neuman (formerly of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra). In 2021 I moved house and had to radically downsize, so I donated my piano to a lovely crowd-funded socio-cultural centre in Amsterdam - Pondok. It was a fond goodbye, watching it going down to street-level with a piano lift, but I knew it had found a good home.

   

Yesterday, after twenty-six years, my piano and Vivian's cello were finally re-united. They made music together at a little concert by the Meander Trio. And yes, with pianist Jenny Hess, Edith played that Adagio of the Sonata by François Francœur.... in memory of Vivian. It was a deeply emotional occasion for me and my boys.

     Edith Neuman (cello) and Jenny Hess (piano) reuniting my old friends

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Here's Pierre Fournier with the Francœur on YouTube. https://youtu.be/aUqqgPASxIg