Thursday, November 29, 2012

Color key (getting ready to paint something) / Listening to old rock & roll / Looking to the east


Took inventory of my paint tubes and made a color key:


While working on the color key, I listened to a collection of old rock & roll songs.  It must have been when I was 7 years old that I first heard this:


When I went out on the porch, I saw this:
You can hear a Steller's Jay at the end of the clip.

3 comments:

Taradharma said...

love the motion on the song!

so, when you do your inventory and color key, do you already have an image in your head or is this merely setting the scene for creativity? I love hearing about process.

Sabine said...

I think I was the same age when I first heard this music - in the house of an US army family stationed in Germany. And a whole new world opened up: BBQ, white sliced bread, Barbie dolls, Superman comics, ketchup, grown ups dancing in shorts...

am said...

Taradharma -- It's been so long since I painted
that I decided to start by re-introducing myself to the colors I have on hand. It seemed a good idea to get used to using a paintbrush again by making a color chart.

Music has always been important to me as I am painting. The last time I did any painting (spring of 2007), I listened to a reading of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" instead of listening to music, and the result was a series of mostly non-figurative and non-landscape-influenced color and pattern explorations. During my most productive painting period in the 1980s, I frequently listened to Bob Dylan while painting.

Right now, I don't have any images in my head.
They will come as I put color on the watercolor paper and listen to music. At least that was my experience in the past. Sometimes I try to paint something I have seen in a dream or something from my memory along with images that come up when I listen to music.

Sabine -- Sorry to hear about your recent exhaustion. I am grateful for the energy you put into your blog.

Thanks for the link to the article about Thomas W. Adorno. Van Morrison's "In the Days Before Rock and Roll" came to mind as I was thinking about how rock and roll meant so much to so many of us around the world, and now after reading about Thomas W. Adorno's ideas, I'm remembering Joni Mitchell's lyrics about the "star-making machinery behind the popular song."

Interesting to think about something as subversive as rock and roll being exported, along with Barbie dolls, from the United States as part of the "culture industry" that Adorno wrote about so perceptively.