Handel's Story.

Handel's Coronation Anthem, in three movements.


just back in december i had the opportunity to collaborate on the Briercrest Christmas Celebration as a Vison Team member and contributing artist. My task was to listen to the music selections, and to put something on to 3 large screens, that would sit behind the choir and be the entire backdrop for the Celebration.
Paired with our lighting design, there would be no decoration in the gigantic modern hildebrand chapel. It was a new direction for the Christmas Celebration, so the stakes were high.


I chose to complete animations in Apple's Motion for the screens, treating them as one large surface.


The night opened with Handel's Coronation Anthem, and i listened to it endlessly.
When it came time to assign imagery, the song, more than any other in the Celebration spoke itself into a story in my mind. 


All i could see when i heard the piece was the Biblical Creation Account, Genesis 1-2.  I saw the hebrew words (i studied ancient-hebrew in college) and the complex ideas show in their ancient script that is lost to our roman alphabet.  I saw colors and the flow of creation and redemption, as told from long ago.


the first movement jumps and is full of a wandering and busy Joy, i see the rainbow split from threads from the darkness, circling out and sizing out the seen spectrum.  the spectrum breaks into deeply contrasting lights as light and dark are created. A cloud and blue of day, a black and red for night. the white of cloud, the dark coffee-bean brown of soil and the clear highlights of water come together until the earth floats in the stars and in the song takes us at the end of the movement to a grove a trees that fall behind us as we move through the deep of them.


It all gets dark and blue for the second movement, and we see adam and eve, happy and in white, against the sad movement that already has let out the news of their fated fall from joy and grace. they are in love and soon, as the choir's song vamps, they are ashamed and blaming, and running.
the end of the second movement they are caught under the eye of a powerful God.


The third movement is moving through the trees again only now they are winter white and spring is breaking through and all turns green and gold.
This is the royal end and the redemption and reuniting of adam and eve, and God and humanity.


The song is such a story, with beginning middle and end, and my interpretation likely will never leave me, despite anything Handel ever intended. 


If it's a coronation, it is the story of the prodigal son who returns home after taking his father's inheritance before he dies and squandering it- only for his father to throw the greatest of feasts for him and setting a crown on his head.

Something Missing

Here is the scene:
 It was twice a weekday, morning and evening,  I'd drive down the Canada HWY 1 in an old Honda station-wagon hatchback from 89.
Take a picture of that, as i did every now and then, stopping on the side of the road.  something is missing.
Look closely at the image, all twelve mega-pixels worth, see the rough texture of the dashboard as i drive, or the rusty edges of the hood.  The image is clear, but the experience and emotion is lost.
That is not the emotion created while driving in the Honda (Goof-Troop, i called it).
To have the full experience, you need the thick drone of the tries against the pavement, the occasional squeaks in the shocks. You need the raspy hum of the motor, and vibrating rattle of the doors and windows. it all feels incomplete without that whirring fan pumping the hot air around my legs to save me from Canadian Winter.  now that's the picture i can't take. there is the moment.
I think of it and how i can look at the pictures and miss the noise that i use my iPod and headphones to do away with when i drive.

Art and Living: thinking out loud

David Maybury Lewis once asked "why do we separate art and living?" in his documentary on the Wodaabes tribe of Niger, who, in his terms, doesn't make a split between art and everyday life.

His phrase juxtaposes shots of the tribe in their artist regalia and some western family in bland button up shirts, ties, and pull-over sweaters walking looking at paintings in an art museum. His point is that they integrate art as part of living itself, while we separate it and leave it in museums.

I wonder that David has got us westerners wrong.

We, in the west, are classically too hard on ourselves and count the things we don't deal with everyday as exotic and artful, and forget that our lives too, are art in all parts- from the bland suits we wear to the bottled water we drink from.

try telling the clothing designer that he is not an artist who makes his life on his craft.

it's fair to say that different societies view art differently from one another, but that perception is just that... perception from a certain plane of thinking. As well, very very very few cultures actually do not distinguish between art and life.

what does that even mean? who would say art is not a part of life? when i think about it, it must mean everyday life, and even that point seems farfetched when i really think about it.

we make distinction between paintings in museums and the make-up we put on our faces, but that line is pragmatic.

show an exotic tribe at one of their very few festivals, all gussied up and differently ceremonial about everything than us, and it will look like we keep art in a museum and they live it out, but that is far from the truth. methinks it is taking advantage of that festival and the fact that their garb for the occasion is much more elaborate than our common t-shirt and jeans.

And even the Wodaabe women carry around their 'calabashes' (pottery) which is never used but set up for display at their festivals a couple times a year... which sounds like an art-show to me.

The Happiest Man in the World