MUSIC: Theme Songs for Our Artistic Methods

Richard Bledsoe “At the Crossroad” acrylic on canvas 24″ x 30″

.

I’ve written before about how vital music is in our studio, as the soundtrack of our art. Recently my wife Michele Bledsoe and I took our musical influences to an even greater intensity. One afternoon while we were painting, we identified songs that we felt epitomized the way that each other approached creating our art.

You see Michele and I have very different methods to the way we paint; we are diametrically positioned, which is why being a married artist couple works so well for us. Opposites attract. We both act as conduits in our artistic expression, but it’s very different forces that we channel.

Michele has spent years watching me paint in a kind of frenzied trance, taken outside of my normal senses in service of the art. While I paint I tend to pace, curse, pray, rant. It’s an ecstatic process for me; not just in the sense of happiness, even though it fills me with joy. It’s so intense I’m not paying attention to the way I’m behaving. An unknowing witness would not understand all my frantic swearing is actually a sign of overwhelming engagement, as I push further.

Michele’s song for me is “Crossroads” by Tom Waits, a collaboration with writer William Burroughs. The story it tells shows the sense of abandonment to the demands of creation, no matter the personal cost. There is nothing diabolical about what I’m going for, but the reckless commitment is there. I always say painting is my healthiest addiction.

Click the image to see the video “Crossroads” here:

The lyrics:

Now, George was a good straight boy to begin with, but there was bad blood
In him someway

and he got into the magic bullets that lead straight to
Devil’s work, just like marijuana leads to heroin;

you think you can take them bullets or leave ’em, do you?
Just save a few for your bad days

Well, well we all have those bad days when we can’t hit for shit.

And the more of them magics you use, the more bad days you have without them
So it comes down to finally all your days being bad without the bullets
It’s magics or nothing
Time to stop chippying around and kidding yourself.
Kid, you’re hooked, heavy as lead

And that’s where old George found himself
Out there at the crossroads
Molding the Devil’s bullets
Now a man figures it’s his bullets, so it will take what he wants
But it don’t always work out that way

You see, some bullets is special for a single target
A certain stag, or a certain person
And no matter where you aim, that’s where the bullet will end up
And in the moment of aiming, the gun turns into a dowser’s wand
And points where the bullet wants to go

George Schmidt was moving in a series of convulsive spasms, like someone
With an epileptic fit, with his face contorted and his eyes wild like a
Lassoed horse bracing his legs. But something kept pulling him on. Now
He’s picking up the skulls and making the circle.

I guess old George didn’t rightly know what he was getting himself into
The fit was on him and it carried him right to the crossroads

.

 Michele’s mode of painting could not be more different.

Michele Bledsoe “The Great Fear of Falling” acrylic on canvas 14″ x 11″

.

I have spent years watching Michele work tranquilly at her easel. She sits down and the art just begins to flow out of her, methodically, with great order. Layer upon the layer the intensity builds without interruption until she has crafted a mysterious and moving environment. She calmly renders complex compositions with profound depths and eruptions of otherworldly expressiveness.

What musician other than Ludwig Van Beethoven could reflect such a method?

My song for Michele is Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7 in A major, Op. 92, the second movement, Allegretto. It starts so quietly, but goes through cycles of growth until it is truly cosmic in scale. Such precision and feeling. That is how Michele makes her art.

There aren’t any lyrics, but there’s no need for those when the music speaks so eloquently on its own.

Click on the image to see the video for the 7th Symphony, “Allegretto” here:

What would be the theme song of your artistic method?

“The Remodernist’s job is to bring God back into art but not as God was before. Remodernism is not a religion, but we uphold that it is essential to regain enthusiasm (from the Greek, en theos to be possessed by God).”

-The Remodernism Manifesto

PAINTINGS: A Year Later in Tangier I Heard She Was Dead

Richard Bledsoe “A Year Later in Tangier I Heard She was Dead”

acrylic on canvas 12″ x 12″

.

The genre was once referred to as History Painting, and it was considered the highest form of artistic expression. For hundreds of years, ambitious artists poured their skills into epic works which depicted scenes from not only history, but from religion, mythology, and literature as well.

The Modern Art era did a lot to sever visual art from this traditional engagement with story telling. This was a huge mistake.There’s nothing to be gained from trying to substitute theoretical intellectual stylings for the passion, drama and resonance of imagery inspired from narrative, whether derived from reality or imagination.

The Remodernist artist is a story teller, visually defining essential moments in the never ending action of the world, the mind, and the spirit.

A few years back I launched into a series of paintings inspired by a favorite book: Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs. Its controversial reputation obscures many of the elements that I really enjoy about it. It’s totally disjointed and incoherent compared to a conventional novel, but amongst the fragments it is built from are elements of hard boiled noir mysteries, adventure tales, paranoid science fiction, wicked humor, cheap porno, and most poignantly, autobiography.

Burroughs was the black sheep son of wealthy parents. His drug habits and homosexuality kept him in trouble and on the run in the 1940s and 1950s. He and his common-law wife Joan Vollmer wound up in Mexico City. In 1951 an awful event occurred. While they were wasted and partying, Burroughs suggested to Joan it was time for “their William Tell routine.” Joan put a glass on top of her head. Burroughs tried to shoot it off and missed, hitting and killing Joan instead. It was a stupid spontaneous act that haunted Burroughs for the rest of his days. He fled to Morocco and sank into severe addiction. It was in this deranged state he wrote the rambling pages that his friend  Jack Kerouac later assembled at random and typed into the manuscript that became Naked Lunch.

Many of my “Naked Lunch” paintings are crude, rough, and unfinished, which suits the subject matter. I flipped through the book, and just like Burroughs wrote by scrambling random words together, I pulled out random quotes to base my paintings on.

“A Year Later in Tangier I Heard She was Dead” is the best of the series, so far. Painted a few years ago, I remember how moved I was by the quote when I read it. I read into it the futility of denial, and how truth and remembrance must have kept getting through to Burroughs even through his drug haze. It’s haunting, and I feel this painting captures the same sense of sadness and accusation.

ART QUOTES: What is an Artist?

Romare Bearden “Dream of Exile”

If you’re any kind of artist, you make a miraculous journey, and you come back and make some statements in shapes and colors of where you were.

-Romare Bearden

.

William S. Burroughs with his shotgun art

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

-William S. Burroughs

.

Philip Guston

We are image-makers and image-ridden… We work until we vanish.

-Philip Guston

.

George Bellows “Cliff Dwellers”

The artist is the person who makes life more interesting or beautiful, more understandable or mysterious, or probably, in the best sense, more wonderful.

-George Bellows

.

Saul Steinberg

The artist is an educator of artists of the future…

-Saul Steinberg

ART QUOTES: Henry Miller

Henry Miller “The Procession”

One of my favorite writers is Henry Miller. I came to his work after absorbing the books of a whole generation he influenced, the Beats.

I continue to love the works of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, but when I discovered Miller I found out who set the example they followed. Henry Miller surpasses them all with the exuberance of his language, his powerful imagery, his inventive obscenities, and some really thoughtful philosophic musings.

Not only did Miller write, he loved to paint as well. His observations on art and creativity are spectacular. It’s rare to find someone who can articulate the largely nonverbal process of art with such insight.

Here is a sample of Miller’s commentary,  from Book 1 of his roman à clef trilogy, The Rosy Crucifixion:

Art isn’t a solo performance; it’s a symphony in the dark with millions of participants and millions of listeners. The enjoyment of a beautiful thought is nothing to the joy of giving it expression – permanent expression. In fact, it’s almost a sheer impossibility to refrain from giving expression to a great thought. We’re only instruments of a greater power. We’re creators by permission, by grace, as it were. No one creates alone, of and by himself. An artist is an instrument that registers something already existent, something which belongs to the whole world and which, if he is an artist, he is compelled to give back to the world. To keep one’s beautiful ideas to oneself would be like being a virtuoso and sitting in an orchestra with hands folded.

-Henry Miller, Sexus