Music

I've been listening to Gillian Welch's "The Harrow and the Harvest" in the studio. It is as beautiful as her previous album "The Revelator" which Trevor and I listened to everyday for a year when we first bought it.

There is some music that is only for certain times (like "How Bizarre" for the summer of 96) and other music that has kept me going through some very hard times. When the first measured, calm notes drawn across the cello strings of Bach's Cello Suites sound out I remember all the times I've listened to this music. I've listened when I'm upset, when I'm happy, I heard Trevor play it thousands of times on the trumpet as a warm up when he used to practice for gigs, I listened to this music single and now when I'm a mother. I love Bach's cello suites so much I hope I'm listening to them when I'm old.


Here is a list of some of the timeless, music that I carry with me for every occasion
"River" Joni Mitchell- for Christmas and anytime you need comforting

"Greetings to the New Brunette" Billy Bragg- for taking you back to the years of Doc Martins and vintage dresses.

"My Funny Valentine" Chet Baker- Reminds me of when I first saw Trev at a gig, singing his heart out with funny lyrics. Unfortunately as he is a mumbler no-one in the audience could understand them, but the band was laughing!

"Nadine " Chuck Berry- first heard the quintessentially American song when I was travelling around Europe.

"Gymnopedie -No 1" Eric Satie- this piece reminds me of water

37.2 Le Matin" Gabriel Yared

"I Dream a Highway" Gillian Welch

"Flamenco Sketches " Miles Davis

"Tracks of My Tears" The Miracles

"Sex" The Necks- for long summer afternoons just as good in bed as out.

"Heart of Gold" Neil Young- This is a song from my childhood . I love the yearning regret in Young's voice.

"My Baby Just Cares For Me" Nina Simone

"Only the Lonely" Roy Orbison

"Come on Up to the House" Tom Waits

"New Favourite" Alison Krauss

What's real?

Last weekend Trev and I went to see the Gotan Project. It was great. From the moment the musicians walked through the floor to ceiling fringed curtains in their 3- piece suits and fedora hats it was an exhilarating blend of live music and new technology. I love it when artists hit the perfect balance between old and new. Potters often have arcane arguments (mainly at conferences and sometimes on arcane e-mail applications) about what is "real" pottery. It is implied that the only "real" potters are those who make the work from start to finish with their own hands. This artisan approach emphasizes skill over concept. When I was at art college the opposite was true of the painting department, so much so that I graduated with a major in painting without ever using oil paint at all!

Both approaches are ridiculous. Every kind of art is real. The only thing to ask when feeling art is "Does it move me?". How it is made and what tools are used, are all subservient to the final result. The Gotan Project captured the exhilaration and warmth of live music with the accordian, violin, guitars, grand piano and beautiful voice of Cristina Vilallonga while the two musicans on the mixing desk were using amazing new technology which I can't even really describe (it had flashing lights and computers and samples of voices and music). Each element heightened the essential values of the others until there was a glorious blend of old and new with the geeks on the computers one minute, and hitting an ancient percussive instrument known as a cow bell the next!

Megan Washington

My nearest capital city is Brisbane, well -known for the quality of indie music over the years. I've just discovered Megan Washington she has a beautiful voice and, in the theme of this blog here is a clip from youtube using collage!

colour canon

The other day I was listening to Margaret Throsby interview author Sonya Hartnett on Classic FM. Sonya Hartnett chose Pachelbel's Canon as one of her favourite pieces of music. If you don't know the name of this piece of music you will certainly recognize the tune, it is ubiquitous in shopping centres and lifts, but, as Harnett pointed out just because it is played in shopping centres doesn't make it any less beautiful. I totally agree. I've been listening to Pachelbel's Canon for many years and it has taken on a new importance in my life as a mother- it works calming magic on manic two year olds and manic 36 year olds!



Pachelbel's Cannon has also had great signifigance in my artistic life. Wallowing in the post-modern sea at art college Paul Klee (1879-1940)was my lifeline. His elegant, scientific lyrical explorations of colour and line inspired and comforted me. Klee developed a "Canon of Colour Tonality", a formalized graph of colour relationships using lines, circles and triangles. This sounds very dry and boring but Klee's explorations were fascinating and beautiful.



Klee said:
"There are two things in a painter, the eye and the mind;each of them should aid the other. It is necessary to work at their mutual development, in the eye by looking at nature,in the mind by the logic of organized sensations which provides the means of expression."

My Day

I've been in the studio, listening to words of wisdom from some of the greats.

Here is an example of how cooking can get you into trouble

Oh tear my stillhouse down, let it go to rust
Don't leave no trace of the hiding place
Where I made that evil stuff
For all my time and money no profit did I see
That old copper kettle was the death of me

by Gillian Welch


and...how cooking can get you into TROUBLE by Nina Simone...

Somebody told me I made the best jelly roll in town,
I say in town
You must admit that I'm a jelly roll bakin' hound,
bakin' hound
Good jelly roll, jelly roll is so hard to find
We always get the other kind
Nobody in town can bake a sweet jelly roll like mine

Yes indeed, I'm a jelly roll baking hound! Cinnamon scrolls for Easter.

At the end of the day

So rock me mama like a wagon wheel
Rock me mama anyway you feel
Hey mama rock me
Rock me mama like the wind and the rain
Rock me mama like a south-bound train
Hey mama rock me

By the Old Crow Medicine Show.

drawing

Drawing on the web is an interesting phenomenon. The combination of digital and traditional media can create a surprising and moving new way of experiencing drawing. I love this.

Stradbroke Island Pillow Book

We have been to Stradbroke Island. For a week I have woken up to this.....


with whales swimming past, locatable by lacy, delicate puffs of white spume against the deep blue sea.

I was tagged ages ago by someone whose name I accidentally deleted from my e-mail. As a result for the last weeks or so I've been walking around making lists of eight things in my head that I think might be interesting or linked to craft- my own Australian, Stradbroke Island Pillow Book.

1.Things I think are essential in a holiday house
Good linen, and tasteful bedspreads. I once made E and S move from one hotel to another in Spain because the bedspreads were a very bad colour and entirely synthetic (they thanked me afterwards)
2. Best Scrabble Word
GEISHA ( I often try and think of good Scrabble words even though I don't play all that much, or very well.)

3. Last Book Read
"History of the Dead" by Kevin Brockheimer. This was a fascinating, frightening and beautiful book. It deals with themes of memory and what living means through twin plotlines. The first following the disastrous trip to Anatarticta by scientist Laura Byrd and the second set in a place known only as "The City" which is pretty much like Earth but is filled with people who have died and are still remembered by a living soul.

4. I Love the Smell Of.....
sea air, Artemesia (sometimes known as wormwood), wet clay, which I like to think of as rotting granite...I love that smell.

5. Drawing is the central trunk of my practice. Without drawing nothing else I make would exist.

6. I consider throwing pots a form of drawing. 3-dimensional but as distinctive and immediately recognizable as a signature.

7. On Stradbroke Island there is a movement to plant the gardens with native plants. My favourite grevillas were the ones with blue/grey leaves and vivid red flowers and the different varieties of that lovely Australian seaside plant called "Pigface"


8. My favourite Glen Campbell song is "Galveston"

"Galveston, oh Galveston, I still hear your sea waves crashing
While I watch the cannons flashing
I clean my gun and dream of Galveston

I still see her standing by the water
Standing there lookin' out to sea
And is she waiting there for me?
On the beach where we used to run
At Galveston, at Galveston"

(To my mystery tagger, I am so sorry for forgetting your name, please get back in touch.)

being human

I've been watching a documentary called "The Choir of Hard Knocks" . It follows the work of an opera singer, Jonathan Welch as he forms and records a cd of songs with a choir of homeless and disadvantaged people in Melbourne. Jonathan saw the idea in a Readers Digest magazine, secured sponsorship and donated his time and expertise to this wonderful program. Apart from being a great philanthropic venture "The Choir of Hard Knocks" is a documentary about the power of art.

The documentary follows some of the singers, exploring their home lives (what little some of them have) and following the difficulties they face through illness, poverty and struggles with drugs and alcohol getting to rehearsal. When these people arrive and begin to sing it's as if their secret, inner selves are coming out through their voices. If you closed your eyes and just listened you wouldn't know that the beautiful, innocent young girl was a single mother, battling addiction, with a care worn face and nervous manner, some of the old ladies sound just like they are singing along to the church organ ( You know those voices that carry the whole congregation and pick the mumblers up to a higher level?) and will go on to scones and tea afterwards. This alchemy captures the power and vulnerability of being human.

I think this glimpse of the human condition is one of the most valuable things an artist can bring to the world. Great artists manage to capture this vulnerability and passion in every genre. The drawings of Cy Twombly....


food of Thomas Keller....


The rough delicacy of a Simon Reece teabowl...

Happy April

Happy April. To celebrate the coming of winter (finally!) in sunny Queensland next week is officially declared Lepidoptera, week. For those among you who are not Latin scholars or naturalists this means......

Butterfly Week

In honor of this, I post the profound words of Dolly Parton...

Love is like a butterfly
As soft and gentle as a sigh
The multicolored moods of love are like its satin wings
Love makes your heart feel strange inside
It flutters like soft wings in flight
Love is like a butterfly, a rare and gentle thing

I feel it when you're with me
It happens when you kiss me
That rare and gentle feeling that I feel inside
Your touch is soft and gentle
Your kiss is warm and tender
Whenever I am with you I think of butterflies

In appreciation of my dear friend Rebecca the Wrecker I have to add that Nana Mouskouri does a lovely version of this song also.

Feel free to e-mail suggestions , images and Lepidoptera, related things.

I went to a gig last night.
It was one of those wonderful Australian summertime experiences. After a humid day the clouds grew darker and darker. When we got to the Montville Village Hall the Trevor Hart Quartet was set up in the the old wooden building and as the band began to play the rain thundered down on the tin roof, lighting flashed outside to open doors and a cool, rain filled breeze blew over the audience.



The Quartet played improvised jazz and a screen next to the band played a montage of moving images , skyscrapers, clouds flowers and art. "Johnno" had a tropical calypso feel and was accompanied by a montage of old, kitsch Mexican travel posters.







We had pizza and wine at interval and the kids in the audience curled up on blankets on the floor.

PS. I have to declare an interest here as Trevor Hart is my husband!

vessels

Vessels

"The water is wide
I must go o'er
But neither have
I wings to fly
Give me a boat
That can carry two
and both shall row
My love and I"
....an old spiritual about vessels





Alleghany Meadows, potter and craft guerilla. Has a mobile gallery in a dashing old Airstream caravan.



Elizabeth Robinson American potter says...
"My work is about the rituals, and the making, of domestic pottery. I think about objects, how we desire them, surrounding ourselves by stuff to compose the settings for our lives; how we use them"

lyrics

Lyrics from music I've been listening to in the last week....

"I got to keep my eyes open
So I can see the Lord
I'm gonna watch the horizon
For a brand new Ford"

"Jesus Gonna be Here" Tom Waits sung by Pearly Black with Trevor Hart and John Rodgers last night at the Brewery in Brisbane.

"...so hush little baby don't you cry"
"Summertime" from Porgy and Bess sung by Trevor one morning

"Well who's gonna shoe your
pretty little foot
Who's gonna glove your hand
Who's gonna kiss your ruby red lips
And who's gonna be your man?"

"Ruben" the Be Good Tanyas during dinner.

"So grab your bucket grab your spade
We're heading down to Half Moon Bay"

"The Wine Song" The Cat Empire. Fizzy D's best dancing music.

"Oh you are in my blood like holy wine
Oh and you taste so bitter but you taste so sweet
Oh I could drink a case of you
I could drink a case of you darling
And I would still be on my feet
Oh I'd still be on my feet"

Joni Mitchel "A Case of You" We listen to this all the time. It's from the "Blue" album.

"Raindrops on roses
and whiskers on kittens"

"My Favourite Things" The John Coltrane version not the Julie Andrews one. (although I love Julie Andrews)