Snapshots and Solidarity

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Discover Challenge: Snapshots: Tell a broad story using a series of short, focused scenes.

For this week’s Discover Challenge Michelle invites those of us who are visual artists to “share a series of photos or sketches that focus on different details of a larger scene and to “Take us on a journey, one small scene at a time.” These few sketches were made one innocent warm summer’s day watching a majestic heron slowly wading through the shallow waters of the shore line of English Bay, Vancouver. Today however, a day that is anything but innocent, my thoughts are very much with the people of Belgium.

Belgium

JeSuisBelge et JeSuisBruxelles aujourd’hui.

Balletlujah revisited

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dance i

Last June I was inspired by a CBC documentary on the Alberta Ballet Company’s Balletlujah, a celebration of the music of K.D.Lang. My posts on Days 170 and 173 of my 365 day challenge were an expression of that inspiration using photographs I took from my TV screen during the CBC broadcast. For this week’s Photo Challenge: Dance I thought I would revisit those photographs and share with you the magic and sublime beauty of the dancers as they performed both on stage and in the warm Canadian prairie sunshine to the magnificent voice of K.D.Lang.

This is the Alberta Ballet Company’s description of Balletlujah for their 2015-2016 Season:

A true Albertan artistic triumph, Balletlujah! is a remarkable dance creation born from an intimate collaboration between two of Alberta’s most celebrated artists: k.d. lang and Jean Grand-Maître. It features a visually stunning homage to the people and landscapes of the Canadian prairies which shaped lang’s profound vision of music and life. Over 17 incomparable interpretations, including “Constant Craving,” “Big Boned Gal” and “Hallelujah,” Balletlujah! traces the unique journey of a young woman who abandons her hometown for romance and the City of Angels – but the mystical prairies will call her back to her treasured roots and to her true love.

Enjoy K.D.Lang’s wonderful interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, which he described as being done to its “ultimate, blissful state of perfection.”

past imperfect

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abstract ii

1985

“The imperfect is a verb form, found in various languages, which combines past tense (reference to a past time) and imperfective aspect (reference to a continuing or repeated event or state).” Wikipedia

Tuscan Reverie

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For this inaugural Discover Challenge: Blogging the Senses, Cheri asks us publish a post that piques one of the five senses, hearing, sight, touch, smell, and taste, having found inspiration herself in an interview with medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel. Since we are free to “interpret this in any way, and in any format: prose, poetry, photography, audio, video,” and having been also inspired by Erik Kwakkel’s blog myself thanks to Cheri’s introduction, I thought how appropriate this would be to revisit the Abbey of St. Antimo, a former Benedictine Monastry in the commune of Montalcino in Tuscany, which I blogged about over two years ago.

St Antimo

The map is from a journal I kept during our Italian travels in 2000, and the entry for the 21st of April describes our visit to the Abbey that day. As you can read we took the bus from Siena to Montalcino and then walked the 10 kilometres to St. Antimo.

journal

The video is from the photographs I took during that memorable 10 kilometre walk through the magnificent Tuscan countryside. I hope your senses will be piqued as you enjoy the beauty of those Tuscan hills and listen to the Gregorian chant, “Haec Dies” from “Mysterium” a recording made in the Abbey in April 1995 by the five fathers of the Communita die Canonici Regolari di Sant’Antimo.

a little MOZ…ART

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MozArt

delete accents – acrylic on canvas 36″x 47″

Color harmony and tone come together with a little piece of Mozart.

The story of the painting, which I painted a few years ago, is worth re-telling. It began when I was attempting to master Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C, K 330, (without much success I might add). I had obtained a copy of the music in a music sale and as I struggled to learn it I became more and more intrigued by all of the marginalia written by whoever had been my predecessor. I particularly enjoyed, and could relate to, the note written presumably by his or her music teacher, “breathe”. You will find the small section I used for the painting at the top of the page.

Sonata K330

For the completeness of this week’s Photo Challenge I thought I would search for a recording of the Sonata and found one by Deutsche Grammophon of Vladimir Horowitz in 1986, which was recorded in Moscow.

Why not follow along with the music and enjoy the mastery of one of the greatest pianists who has ever lived.

A Little Mozart iii