Many Rivers

Just the day before yesterday, I was performing Brahms and Beethoven with Princeton Pro Musica; it was a glorious program on a glorious fall day. Gratification was the word of the hour.

Tonight we'll rehearse and move on from those compositions, alternately legato and percussive, into the precise textures of Bach for our next program.  I'm singing a new part in the Magnificat in the large chorus; and with the Chamber Chorus, also a section of the Christmas Oratorio new to me, all for a December 20 concert. Notwithstanding how much time I will be putting into all that, I think working on Bach's music for the next 7 weeks is going to benefit my work in the studio. I would even say it is the perfect accompaniment to the new direction I started to take this summer. I've enjoyed some new imagery coming out of some new processes and ideas, about which I might elaborate at some point; but not yet.

 

©2014 Ravenna Taylor, "Many Rivers," 2014, oil on paper, 24 x 22-1/2 inches (for JWR)

Once I get my gardens put to bed for the winter, that will be good for the studio work too. Today is a beautiful day and I hope to make good use of it.

I wish for what I always wish: no crisis to interrupt my flow.
It's always something, but I keep hoping for nothing - some things never change.
But when things go badly, change is a certainty to be cherished.

I've said it already: Long live mortality. Without it, would a body heal? Would it need to?
Without mortality, would summer turn to autumn, would trees become orange and translucent yellow? Would a garden ever sleep?

Fertile Grounds

The season's first Katydid is not a shy one -- she isn't one to fold herself into green blades of stiltgrass, no -- Two days now I've found her sunning, barely pretending to hide beneath a curl unfolding at the Dahlia's heart:

I love the way that carmine optically vibrates against her Granny Smith green, so suggestive of the crunchy waves of vibratory sound the katydids produce in August -- against the walnut trees' silently fading leaves, prematurely falling, thinning the shade.

It's been a remarkable summer in the Mid-Atlantic, more like New England summers, with sweaters and light quilts never entirely out of reach. I accomplished some replanting of my neglected gardens earlier in the season, and have not once had to water my plants!

My summer has folded some things away, and unfolded others. I had a fantastic studio visit with a friend who passed through; I enjoyed inspiring visits with a couple other artists -- all whom I met originally on Facebook, amazingly. I'm still hoping to manage a few more before the summer ends and there will be other demands on my time. 

I took a walk after one studio visit, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where we visited my grandmother often in my childhood, in the house where my mother grew up on Leonard Street. The street, when I was a child, would have been spilling with neighbors visiting on their stoops on such a fine day in June, children playing on the sidewalks. But when I was there some weeks ago, it was deserted. I walked on Manhattan Avenue and Greenpoint Avenue, remembering my solitary walks there when I got tired of hanging around with Grandma and Nana and my mother in the railroad flat, remembering coming up from the subway with Grandma, or going to the bank, or church. I could still see some vestiges of the Polish heritage of that neighborhood (though my mother's side was Irish), hyphenated by hipsters in their white "ear pods." I stared at the facade of my mother's home, and remembered the smell when we used to enter through the now-locked doors into the vestibule. One day I hope to be hanging there when someone emerges who might let me in to see if that smell is still there... 

Here's a photo between the church and school yard, which I found poignantly suggestive of changes that have altered the cityscape.

The first artist I visited, Gudrun Mertes-Frady, gave me a generous and breath-taking tour of her work, to which I link here -- but be advised that these oil paintings reward close attention in real life; the photo on a computer screen is a mere approximation of her impressive accomplishment. It was a delight to finally meet Gudrun and to see her work, which I love.

More recently, I visited a painter I've also admired for some time, in her new studio in the MANA Contemporary complex in Jersey City, a beautiful and rapidly-developing facility with big aspirations to match the big and mind-expanding spaces it offers! Fran Shalom and I had our first in-person visit, although we'd run into one another in the city at gallery openings a few times. I have long admired her paintings, which are of a vein of colorful and compositional abstraction that I relate to most of all, with references to other painters I enjoy and admire, among them Thomas Nozkowski, also from New Jersey, who now resides in New York.

I'm always shy about photographing artists in their studio, and usually regret that, as I do now. But here's a photo of the Mana complex as I was leaving. There are a few galleries open to the public there, by tour, and public open days are scheduled a few times a year -- it is well worth keeping that on your radar and visiting when you can. The experience of the approach through the clot of Highway 1 & 9, into the abandoned industrial zone, and through the doors to enter a space that reflects soaring ambitions and vision -- it is alone something to behold.

The artist who visited me in my Lambertville, NJ studio is Altoon Sultan, with whom I have developed a valued friendship, mostly online, with occasional rendezvous in the city, visiting art shows together. Altoon will have a show at McKenzie Fine Art in the Lower East Side this fall, and all of us who know her are very excited to see her diverse works presented in that beautiful (and well-attended) space! 
Altoon demonstrated a remarkable stamina in her visit to my studio, taking in my own diverse output, old work, new work, paintings, drawings and collages.
It was a wonderful way to embark on my current project this summer, which is to focus on starting things -- I'm still working on paper, the marvelous Arches Huile, while also preparing and gessoing new panels and canvasses for later. After finishing two new pieces in July, I decided to just work on starting a number of new pieces, to put them aside and just start some more.

I'm really enjoying this process -- more than I've ever enjoyed beginning new work before, I daresay -- and I expect it to serve me well when September arrives, with other commitments, including a pretty demanding season for my chorus and chamber chorus, Princeton Pro Musica. For now, instead of rehearsals on Tuesday nights, I am attending Princeton's US 1 Poets meetings this summer, and working on poems that I am currently writing or which have accumulated over the past year. 

It's been slow as usual for me, but productive. I'll be sharing more about all that in upcoming posts.
Thanks for your visit!

Heat Wave Redux

Last summer, during an intense July heat wave, I completed a series of small works on paper, employing colored pencil, watercolor, gouache; the series allowed me to conserve my body heat and not move from in front of the fan in my studio more than necessary. It turned out to be a very fruitful series of drawings, which nourished oil paintings that followed upon them in the fall. Have a look at the post from last summer: here.

Our spring this year, which unfolded so slowly, seemingly reluctantly, and then retreated back to late winter chill last week, has more than caught up with itself today, and we're having an extraordinarily hot afternoon. As it happens, I have just finished a new watercolor which was based on one of the drawings from last year's Heat Waves. The month of May has been a little overwrought, not just the weather, but myself also -- I've been mainlining adrenaline; but working in watercolor is, for me, a wonderful way to remember to breathe and flow. 

I completed my performance season just this afternoon with audition for the next season with Princeton Pro Musica. The hay is ripe for mowing here, and I was too nervous to feel my best, but I think our kind artistic director, Ryan James Brandau, knows well enough what my better days can be. I will one day learn to breathe better with a pounding heart, I hope, allergies or no.

Now I'll spend the next few months on my other artistic goals. With the dropback from the art world, I'll drop back too, from Facebook. I have no travel plans, I just want to sink into my work: to paint, draw, write, continue study in my private voice lessons, and also to get underway a new website, and learn Lightroom. I'd like to also pay a little more attention to what others might need from me -- I've been in survival mode for too long.

Tell me again, how long is summer?

Ravenna Taylor, 2013, watercolor, gouache, pencil, on handmade toned paper, 20 x 19.5 inches

See other smaller new drawings on my tumblr page, Here Today.

Sonata Rondo

Before going to bed on the night of the full moon, Friday, I stood at the window looking out, and I saw its light reflected in little spots all around, like stationary fireflies. I have never seen snow quite like this; the flakes were individual, and flat and smooth, as though they'd been pressed and glazed before being cast from a cloud. Then they remained separate and didn't clump or cling, were almost like a cold fluffy snow, but those I can usually see, in the characteristic snowflake crystal, and these were, as I say, more flat and shiny, lying like fish scales. They appeared designed for sparkle, intended to delight, to hypnotize, to send me flying into a White Dream of eternal return.

I must describe these things; it makes them last. Some of the phenomena I experience I am not even able to describe, they are too fleeting, faster than the breath of one word. That's where painting takes up. Nature is my life raft. It was for that reason that I had to leave the city. I feel I can't count on anything but the perception and emotional attachment I have to the landscape, rivers, trees, birds and bugs. Maybe it's inherited; I often think of one of the last things my father said before he died: "There will be no more bushes and trees."

It's snowing again today, but a warmer, clumpier, softer snow falling to the ground, in a dimmer, warmer, morning kind of light. An appointment I had has been cancelled, and I'm reassigning those hours to music practice, yippee! I love our current program and even though the concert is more than a month off, already threads of that music have woven themselves into my brain, and I find them when I wake, or in a moment of indecision. This has been a tough winter already, although it's only halfway through, but my private voice lessons too have been sustaining me - I have been quietly working on performance skills for the last few years, and recently had one of those encouraging threshold experiences that give me the impetus to keep on growing -- to no purpose, just because I am, and I can.

Ravenna Taylor, "Song Cycle, Rondo Pastoral," 2010, paper, photos, fabric

I also finished a painting Saturday and started another, and I will bring this one quickly to its conclusion also; I am completing preparations for another online-only exhibition next month. I have one recently completed painting which is impossible to photograph; I'll have someone with more skill and better equipment give it a try, but I'm betting that the optical qualities are not going to translate. It's a pity that my work will only be seen in photos on computer screens; the way I use oils doesn't really come across, the work looks much flatter on screens.

Yesterday I was at a concert (Dryden Ensemble) featuring a fantastic piano that was built to duplicate the one that Mozart used. I loved the sound of that instrument so much (would love to sing recital with a piano like that)! If I had such a piano, I might start playing again, I thought. The pianist gave a little talk about his instrument, and my imagination was sparked by his mention of Beethoven and the piano's evolution -- how Beethoven was working at a time of fast development in the design and building of the fortepiano, and that must have influenced his composition and expression.

I thought about that and how, in our time, what has been developing so fast and has influenced so much of what we do is digital technology. There's a whole world of people who have dedicated themselves to early music. There's another world of people who paint in slow-drying layers, oil, pigment and canvas. I look at art online every single day, and have for the last few years; but I am finding it increasingly dissatisfying. Sometimes I feel as I do when I enter a large supermarket or a restaurant with a long menu, and although I might have entered hungry, I want nothing anymore.

As I prepare for my exhibition, which will occur only on computer screens, it is wonderful to have a show to look forward to, one that is "open to the public" 24 hours every day all over the world. It occurs to me that what looks good in a photo on a computer screen might be having too much influence on the contemporary art world though. I know there are works that I won't put into an online exhibition; they will remain in my studio and be there when I leave this world, I guess, without ever having been a part of the ecology of art thought -- that's how I see the value of exhibiting work, to become part of that ecology. 

Music only exists in the time it is unfolding -- a voice is subject to the conditions of one's anatomy, as is one's "self"; in that way it is more like my life than my drawings and paintings, which will outlast me. Even if they end up in a landfill, they will be all that they ever were for longer than I will be. I guess that's what the poem I published here last week was getting at, with many fewer words than this, today.

The River and the Requiem

Many people might say they are "shy." But it can mean so many things, it may not be something we actually understand in one another, or even in ourselves.

My environment in childhood made me a fearful kid, around people. But alone, with trees, birds, rivers, stones, animals, my imagination - then I had fewer fears; my defiant survivor nature could blossom in that solitude. That's why, although I need my visits to New York City - (and when I'm there I feel my feet falling where my parents and grandparents left their shadows) - I also need to wake and fall asleep in a place with trees and rivers, and the sounds of birds and bugs.

When I moved from a deep forest in the Ozarks to San Francisco, I developed the habit of visiting the beach at least once every week. The beach is a harsh place there; it was a good place to be alone, wrapped in a coat and scarf, armored in fog, with wind buffeting my ears and the surf falling in rhythms.

It was in San Francisco that I began to get more serious about singing. I felt the drive stirring while I was in art school; then when I finished, I had my studio to sing alone in, as loud as I wanted. My neighbor suggested I look for a chorus. I had classical music training in piano, and still played sometimes; I had sung in a chorus in college and afterwards, briefly, but had always been shy about singing around other people. I liked whistling though; sometimes people who whistle very well are closet singers!

I found a chorus through another friend who was singing. On the day of my audition, I drove from my painting studio in Hunters Point to the rehearsal hall. On the way, a gang of small boys who'd taken to throwing stones at passing cars were at the roadside; a fist-sized stone crashed through the passenger side window and landed in the space between the seats. The car was full of glass pebbles, and my adrenaline rushed, but I didn't stop. I auditioned in the aftermath of panic, which seemed to help a little, and I was accepted. Although I felt shy, the chorus was large and I felt somewhat sheltered in its sound, as when I walked on the windy beach. Concerts and years passed, along with milestones in my life, deaths in my family, steps along the way in my work, interruptions for illness; all of these threaded by weekly rehearsals and music that hovered in my head. Even when nothing else was possible, it was almost always possible to sing.

I was in San Francisco 18 years, and a member of the San Francisco Choral Society for 12 years. When my husband and I started to contemplate moving back east, I knew that I had to keep this as a constant in my life, and would only consider a move to a place with proximity to a good community chorus. Ultimately we settled near Princeton, New Jersey, on an old farm near Lambertville and the beautiful Delaware River. I auditioned for Princeton Pro Musica three days after arriving on the east coast and immediately began rehearsals for a program that included Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which seemed a perfect aural match for the autumn landscape that rolled by on my half-hour drive, via backroads, to weekly rehearsals. I missed my friends in San Francisco badly, but I still had this weekly communion, with nature and music and other voices, reinterpreting the art of a great mind.

The Delaware River, looking northwest from Lambertville, New Jersey, October 2012

Membership in Princeton Pro Musica had become so crucial to my existence that the requirement to re-audition every year, with a prepared song, drove me into private voice lessons, something I'd wanted but had been denied at the age of 13. It took me a long time to conquer the fear of hearing myself make those sounds, alone in the studio with my teacher at the piano. But I am a person with a love of craft and study, and the lessons gave more and more back to me, the more I gave to them.

Princeton Pro Musica is a chorus whose members have a high level of skill and commitment, and through my participation and my private lessons over the last 9 years, I have grown so much, through music - but I would still call myself shy. I've had a few opportunities to perform solo with piano, in studio recitals, and each time I get more ill with the anxiety, it seems. However, I like to imagine that, by attempting to grow into this gift, I might someday re-route those mental pathways which made fear, in my youth, more familiar than accomplishment.

Today we will perform with our new director, Ryan James Brandau, for the first time since retirement of our founding director, Frances Fowler Slade. I feel privileged to merit a place in this chorus, and music has become a closer second to my commitment to painting  - though still a second, and I grow sad when my life's balance is thrown off and I am not in the studio as much as I wish - ironically, this consistently occurs in performance week.

I have a custom of choosing a focal point for my emotional investment in performance, and since we so often perform large Requiems with orchestra, it is often a loss that I commemorate. Today I will have in mind loss that is regrettable: a recent death; but I want to choose a place in the program to sing for a loss I still look forward to: the loss of all fear.

"Elusive Images"

Saturday was the last day to view this exhibit in Maplewood, New Jersey, which included three of my oil paintings and one framed painted collage.

I'll be heading back up to retrieve the work this week, in between multiple chorus rehearsals for a Sunday performance at the Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton with the Princeton Pro Musica Chamber Chorus; we are participating in the Guild for Early Music event there this year. In just a few more weeks, the Princeton Pro Musica full chorus will perform Bach and Mozart in Richardson Auditorium on the Princeton University campus, with our new director, Ryan James Brandau -- rehearsals are going great!

Thank you to GAS Gallery And Studio directors, Rick Hauser and Micha Hamilton, with curator Joe Walentini, for including my work among others in the exhibition, "Elusive Images," in a graceful installation!

at left: "Hokey Pokey," 2011, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches

at right: "Bridge 2, "2012, painted collage, 21-1/4 x 22-3/4 inches

at right: "That Said," 2008, oil on panel, 22 x 28 inches

GAS Gallery And Studio, Maplewood, New Jersey

and "AK's Suggestion," 2006, oil on wood, 15 x 12 inches