Silence of the Dunes

My home for two weeks of total silence____Margo-Gelb Shack (aka Boris)_Provincetown MA

I said in my previous blog _ Pursuit of an Idea, that I’d give you some background into how I came to continue to develop my journey into The Visual Interpretation of Contemporary Chamber Music. I spoke of how I wondered what the antithesis of sound/music was, silence. I was curious about about this concept.

That is how I landed in one of the most incredible places on earth. Where I found silence, in the dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts. At the tip of Cape Cod was where I experienced my next Residency. This link below, will tell you a little about what I found there; looking for the opportunity to delve into drawing silence.

One of the requirements of being given this residency was to exhibit my work at a chosen venue on Cape Cod. I chose the Hudson Gallery at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown because my residency had been so closely connected with the town.

At the same time, I had another residency there for a month. What a gift that was.

I had intended to continue my series about Silence, but found my head kept filling with music. I gave in to the music and ended up creating some of my first serious pieces of the Music Series. I seemed to respond to contemporary chamber music most vividly. I’m sure it was the individual instruments that spoke to me.

I decided to work on at least one large piece. The work I had done at VSC made me realize that I loved the physicality of the large format. I could use my whole body_ swooping across the paper with giant gestures. Feeling the drag of the graphite and Charcoal against the paper.

I had become enamored with Steve Reich’s work; especially his Desert Music_Fast

I started this work on the floor, with grand gestures of fluid ink as underlying voices. Adding different elements of ink, I worked back and forth between the floor and the wall.

Steve Reich: Desert Music_Fast

The FAWC Residency proved quite fruitful for my Music Series. I had brought a lot of different types of music to listen to while I was working. One of these pieces I found haunting. It required a different approach from my usual mark making on paper. It was George Crumb’s_Ancient Voices of The Earth. I saw floating layers of back and forth of ethereal fog produced by the oboe. There were also striking moments of organized lines, drips, clicking lines. I decided to use mylar as a substrate instead of paper because it created more of a soft layered mesmerizing feel. I worked on both sides - revealing the back and forth of sounds.

During this time of concentrated work time, I was able to produce several fun pieces_almost like doodles: Toot Your Flute, Unfinished Score 2, among others.

This time in Provincetown proved to be exactly what my grounding needed to start to really produce some delicious moments of connection of music and art.

Stay with me as I continue Drawing My Journey -Through Music and Marks……