lateral neck studies oil on wood
j a m e s m o r r e n
old love
0
(Aoi by Renata, 2011)
THINKIN’:
For many personal reasons I look back upon this past couple of years reflecting on a grand amount of momentum in direction, perhaps paying honor to my inner child too, the older I get the more I feel at home with myself. I say for personal reasons as I find it trivial to discuss matters of love but it has been love that has reared its adoring beautiful questioning craziness to instigate a healthy portion of this change. It has been finding love in a soul mate muse, her child, even her dog, and her friends. We give each other much life and perspective. In terms of creativity (keeping things professional here), within her writing and her goals there is an end product, there is a place to reach with the craft. I suppose I thought this at some points, however for me the ‘mountain’ we are collectively climbing is now shrouded in heavy fluffy clouds and so there is no telling what path to take, and where the end is – the important thing is to keep moving on; “I’m pumping blood” to quote the fantastic new collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica (can you smell the sarcasm)… I should rephrase it, as the analogy of the fisherman (or fisher woman), throwing his or her net out there and seeing what it will harvest: You never know what you will catch, the motivation is survival and so there is no stopping, even when you have caught that mega-whale of a fish; it might sloose itself loose off the boat. Or you might find yourself stuck in ice (i.e. day job) and find it difficult to render nutrition from the icy desert (creative satisfaction) - you must keep hunting for the morsels that stabilize your craft, your soul, even if it means eating something you don’t like sometimes. Visually, I never thought I would appreciate so much more what the old-masters had laid out for the rest of humanity, not too long ago, and the more I have delved into this aged discipline the more I have found confidence in my own hand and vision. Not everything has to be ‘stylized’… The more we observe nature and the human drama that is contained on her shifting stage, the more we become our own scientist, the more exciting our work can be and the more truthful what we have to share with others will be; we cannot loose touch… The developments have also been in finding love deeper with close friends and creative kin. The band and I trudge on thusly. With music (and art), we pick up our shields, swords, and mortal powers to defend what we see as timeless truth and beauty. Where I see us being this somewhat progressive and avant garde experience (in comparison to the experimental noise scene I am doubly associating with before rooting myself in with a ‘sceneless’ NYC), the brothers in the band also see the band as an homage to our creative unconscious steeped in the fantasy medieval world. Thus the band has harnessed an arsenal of output from our dreams and we are left with something I have a hard time describing to people, a smile on my face as I say, “we are medieval band”, I usually veer away from putting it in a box, another mountain shrouded in clouds; usually I add, “you should just come to the next show”… Music and art. Audio and visual. It just keeps pulsing like the octopus or the nautilus, natural living waves. A random fact that I was thrilled to come across is that anatomically, if you draw a line down from the ear-hole of a standing upright human skeleton, it will eventually intersect with the arch of the foot, a symbol of movement. And within that ear (tissue wise), one of the main parts, the cochlea, has an exact design mimicking that of the nautilus and the Fibonacci spiral, continually interpreting these waves of sound and pulsing them back into our brain. The noise never stops.
This guy kicks ass… ‘a forgotten master’ according to the bearded roman blog.
Jean_Auguste_Dominique_Ingres_-_Roger_Delivering_Angelica
