*I'll probably use this blog as a somewhat journalling, exploration, and recording process throughout, so if you mainly like the travel talk, feel free to skip the art section :) Plus, I think sharing the process will help me stay focused and keep me accountable to actually DO it!
It look me a couple of years to really narrow down what I wanted this series to be about, although I figured it would be somewhat related to (one of my favorite artistic subjects) color theory. My senior series as a fine arts student in college was color and spacial relationship studies and the small pieces I've done since then have still been related to the breakdown of color and perspective.
One of my past projects that I wish I'd explored more was an initial look into the correlation of "chance" in art. I started with the writings and ideas of John Cage, one of the most influential modern composers of the 20th century, as I'd studied him a bit during my years studying piano. Throughout his life he experimented with combining charts, ideas, thoughts in an overlapping way with music. He broke "music" down to just "sound"...and sometimes "silence" as his most famous piece is 4'33" where the pianist sits at the piano for exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds without playing a single note. The inconsequential sounds of room become the piece.
He also experimented with various sounds, like in his pieces for "prepared piano" which I ended up performing. Here he gives a full detailed "key" to follow to prepare the insides of a grand piano. Rubber stoppers, pieces of plastic, nuts, and bolts are all placed in specified distances between strings before the piece is performed...thus transforming the piano into something else. *Since the recording I have of my performance was before digital cameras :) I'll just include this other video that shows some great shots of the preparation and an example of the sounds. *email readers must click to online page to watch*
Another idea Cage experimented with was that of chance. In some cases he would use chance in techniques like tossing coins on charts to determine pitch, duration, and tone of musical compositions. That's what I wanted to try and show in visual sense rather than an auditory. For a simple showing of this, I sat in 3 locations for 30 minutes each and recorded what passed on the road (at the beach, on my street, downtown near the college). Each "passer-by" (car, suv, bike, truck, dog, walker, etc) were color-coded and the canvas was divided into the number of occurrences in the half-hour and colors placed in order of occurrence. There wasn't anything too complicated about this - but was just a quick study for a presentation I had to do... But ever since then, I've really wanted to dive in and do a proper series of well-documented pieces.
...that led me to various studies from Aristotle and Newton to modern scientists and thinkers like Longuet-Higgins. Theory of music and color. Visual and audio wave correlation. LOTS of reading. ...and hopefully soon, some actual paint.
(to be continued)
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