Week 6 - MJH Among Others

I felt a bit overloaded my the amount of music this week.  But I mean that in a good way.  There is such a plethora of amazing MJH music, and it all began to swirl around in my ears, forming something I wasn't quite sure what it could be. So I just kept listening, and began to look for inspiration outside as well as inside the class.  Incredibly inspired by other artists, especially some from our class, I started experimenting with a relatively unfamiliar medium: digital.

I began on illustrator, using every tool which looked interesting until I came up with a very abstract formation of light and energy.  From there, I do what I always do (and I mean always) when I am entering a critical stage in my artwork.  I put on my headphones, turned up the volume and put on Dark Side of the Moon.  With 48 minutes to go before my work would be done (it always happens to work out just about right). The similarity with my images and the DSotM cover is coincidence, although I do think there is some power in the idea of looking to the cosmos. I began experimenting further with effects, quickly realizing I was finished with adding new forms.  One of the most difficult things for a visual artist, at least for me, is to know when to stop.  It is a subtle art in of itself, being able to step back and say "maybe it isn'y perfect, but...maybe it is".

From there, I moved the image into photoshop and had an epiphany just as "Us and Them" began to play.  This image takes on a completely different form with one simple change: the background color. So from there it was only a matter of time before I came upon the posturize tool, and as "Any Color You Like" filled my eardrums, one image became two, and two became 8. 8 forms of the same form.

And, when I had finished, a short listen to Mississippi John Hurt's "My Creole Belle" summed up the whole experience pretty well. 

"When the stars do shine

I'll call her mine

My darlin' baby

My Creole belle"

Week 5 - Barbara Allen

This song is very terrifying.  The lone female voice, unaccompanied by any instrumentation creates a deep lamentable mood which is full of such a beautiful sorrow.  It suggests to me a sense of longing, a desire for more, for life.  A desire for a life now waning, falling away beneath the aether.

I imagine a dying figure, and hands reaching out towards this figure, extending but not far enough, searching but not enough to find their target, the lone dying figure.  The figure materialized through a heartbeat, both comforted and strangled by a surrounding push and pull of hands. The hands are but mere shades, gestures of their true forms, unable to grasp and hold on to what is dying, and will die.