April 2011
23 posts
1 tag
BSO Concert
As an amateur string player, I am usually focused on the violins and lower strings, but last night at the BSO, all eyes, including mine, were on the snare drummer who anchored Ravel’s Bolero with seventeen minutes of playing the same repeated figure. His concentration and focus richly deserved the solo bow. Simon Trpceski was the soloist in the Liszt Piano Concerto a piece that really...
Momentary Genius
It is amazing how clever one feels at the start of a project or a painting. Sketch in the overall design and greatness awaits. Block in the colors and it’s a work of genius! But wait, details are required and the devil really is in them. Half way through the picture, even talent seems a stretch, and while there is always pleasure in bringing a work to satisfactory completion, we’re...
Bach's St. John Passion
We were fortunate to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s terrific rendition of Bach’s “The Passion According to St. John” last week. The smallish, Bach sized orchestra, without percussion or brasses; the harpsichords, organ, and viola da gamba were all excellent, as was the always impressive Tanglewood Festival chorus. It was, however, a special pleasure to hear conductor...
Coloring sketches
Sometimes it’s fun to scan in sketches and dump color in with either Photoshop or Corel Painter. If you can close up the lines around shapes, you can get nice flat areas of color for a print effect.
Poetry Reading
I went last night to the annual Wallace Stevens Poetry Program at the university. A fun evening with good student poets and August Kleinzahler, who gave a vigorous and amusing reading. The MC’s introduction spoke of Ginsberg and a host of modern influences, but I was reminded most of Walt Whitman, who also lived for a time in New Jersey and who was also fond of lists and catalogues, of catch...
First warblers of Spring
We were walking on the rail line yesterday when there was a great twittering and chirping in the trees: myrtle warblers just up from the south. These are pretty blue gray birds with bold black side stripes on their white bellies and bright yellow rumps and wing patches, hence their more modern name, the yellow rumped warbler. A new nomenclature that is clearly a case of substituting convenience...
Poets
Last night I did a reading at one of our regional libraries in company with five poets. I left with a real admiration for the poets, who, even more than fiction writers and certainly more than our non-fiction colleagues, labor with slim hope of any material reward. They read for each other in poetry societies, they read for the public, they get published, if at all, in slim and obscure literary...
Garden Season Begins
Yesterday gardening season officially began. Sure, I’ve been pruning and picking up fallen branches and raking last season’s leaves off the beds. But real gardening begins with planting. That means digging through the leaf pile to find compost, lugging compost to the box beds and getting rid of the inevitable field grass that took root over the winter. Digging, cultivating, raking,...
More signs of spring
Five handsome male mergansers were on the rail line ponds this week, lovely chalk white birds with green black heads. The females will be along shortly. There were tree swallows twittering overhead and the first phoebe of the spring calling in his raspy voice. Peepers active, too, though maybe not as many yet as there should be once we get out of the freezing range at night.
Final version Swing Bridge
Here’s the finished product. Because most of the colors are muted, I added the plane with its advertising banner as a festive touch.
step two
Although I had to get a photo of the Chicago swing bridge I wanted to paint, I never work directly from a photograph. This sketch is the intermediate step between the photo and my visual memory and the finished painting.
Tree Pruning
It’s been cold so long here and the little orchard has had so much snow, that I am only now starting pruning the apple trees. Peach trees and the pears need little but almost every limb on the apple trees has sprouted a fan of water shoots which need to be cut off, and the poor plum tree has some galls that need to be removed. I have to prune carefully because my assistant is fond of getting...
New Music
One of life’s little pleasures is acquiring new music. For the modestly talented ( and I’m maybe stretching even there) this means new, interesting music that does not have too many fast passages to tax elderly fingers, nor too many double stops, the bane of many other violinists. It is also nice to get relatively new music and new composers, including some women composers. This past...
