FICTIVE THINGS:
Cross Rhythms, or
The Jazz Curtain
Cross Rhythms, or The Jazz Curtain:
oil & charcoal on canvas, February/March 2005;
hanging scroll, canvas size 210 x 250 cms
Contents of this page
Other Fictive Things pages
Noah drunk & Dionysus ReBorn, 2006
Stations of the Cross as from the Eyes of Jesus, 2007
The Jazz Curtain Sketches:
The Bigger RoughPaper SketchBook
heavy rough watercolour paper, haphazard sizes approximately 11" x 12"
most sheets are executed in oil sticks; or charcoal pencil; or ink; other media are indicated.
The commission wanted an image of jazz outdoors and so my first outlines concentrate on a tree and the saxophonist leaning against it...
p.3
I already had in mind the Wallace Stevens poem mentioned elsewhere (& reproduced here) but also a passage which since school days has enchanted me, from the 8th Eclogue of Vergil, in which love-sick Damon, equipped with his reed-pipe, seeks out a 'smooth' olive against which to lean, before he's prepared to start his dawn song in competition with Alphesiboeus.
frigida vix caelo noctis decesserat umbra
cum ros in tenera pecori gratissimus herba
incumbens tereti Damon sic coepit olivae
Only just was the cold shadow of night slipping from the sky,
As the flock is happiest to find the dew on the soft grass;
Then did Damon begin to sing, leaning against a smooth olive...
Vergil: Eclogue viii; ll.14-16
Ever since reading that image it has struck me as one of the simplest and most touching of ideas and it infected my picture at almost every moment.
So, my saxophonist has chosen a welcoming, gentle and benign tree.
pp.4 & 5
pp.6-7
As work progressed I realised that many of the themes of my recent work — and in particular the gaze down onto the sea from the heights of Capri — seemed to come together and with so large a canvas to use, I liked the idea that this would bring all sorts of work together in one; hence, strong echoes of Capri started to appear, in the form of a bay and the far-off sight of Vesuvius... The overlooking perched roof is also in my Capri pictures (representing the lodge of the sphynx there), but its pictorial charm for me resides very much in its sense of being from a Chinese scroll, a scholar's vantage upon the mad world...
p.9
p.10
Now the sketches begin to take on the character of exploring what had been decided rather than requiring new ideas. The ground was prepared. Just detail now, I thought...
The final element to appear is the dance; it became clear that no self-respecting Mediterranean olive-sheltered minstrel would fail to inspire a dancing girl, and acordingly she emerges — almong with her companions...
p.12
pp.14-15
p.17 [make-up pencil and gold effect brush]
pp.18
& 19
pp.20 & 21
And as the dance appears the rest of nature seems to take on the dance...
pp.22-23
Landscape as a setting for musicians & dancers...
p.33
pp.34 & 35
p.36
The dancing squiggles again...
pp.46-47
p.49
In the Studio...
The general composition had been set now: one single tree in the middle, its arms spread, with the sun and the sea to the right and the 'pavilion' to the left.
At this point I started painting, the scroll-canvas on the floor of my studio in the Mairie at Duranus.
One attraction — or necessity — was that the
tree be central, since my use of glazes and layers requires me to paint flat;
and so, the entire large canvas was done on the floor... the central tree gave
me a path to all parts of the working area and would be painted in at the last
moment.
All was well until the moment at which, the outlines done — often with a brush on a stick — the tree took on a new life.
I could not help seeing that the interplay of branches and the slant of the fall of the trunk had revealed a Crucifix. [pp.26 & 27]
And the face of Christ.
p.28 My olive grove had new meaning.