Alchemy of Autumn

This is my favorite time of year. In class you're making pictures that couldn't have been predicted even a few short weeks ago. I'm enthralled by the process, this convergence, this transmutation of one thing into another thing, idea into material, image into body. I don't know how it happens, even as it unfolds right in front of me.

Last Sunday afternoon at the Brooklyn Central Library we heard Trio Solisti perform chamber music from several different eras. As always, the comfortable elegance of the Dweck Center was the perfect setting for a quiet reprieve from the rush of the end of the term. (I've written about the Library's concert program here, and I still recommend it strongly.)

The end of the afternoon brought Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. You've probably heard it before; I'd heard it many times but never knew what it was called.

(Click the 'play' button to hear the Promenade opening.)



The story behind this composition is that Mussorgsky was inspired to write it after looking at the drawings and watercolors of his good friend, Viktor Hartmann, who had recently died. The music unfolds in a series of vignettes that reflect Mussorgsky's experience of wandering from picture to picture, suggesting the flux of his attention as it swayed toward one point but then was dislodged and refocused someplace else.

Trio Solisti's arrangement was spectacular, and the synchronicity of hearing it this week was momentous.

From the first week we met I've rolled this thought around in class and threaded it through our conversations — how do pictures become themselves? Where do they come from? How do they emerge? How do they resolve?

Pictures from an Exhibition brings a new wrinkle and perhaps a new focus as well — from one medium into another, sound to picture, ink and pigment on paper transmuted into tone and rhythm, fiber vibrating against fiber and hammers hitting strings, echoing — the root is the experience, that sensory moment paused and contemplated and then put into action, amplified by thought and wonder, to become something else, something new.

Working together these past several months has accelerated a process of beginning, but just barely to get it started. I'm seeing so much new work and authentic picture-making starting to happen. I hope that you'll keep something of this experience alive in your day to day travels even as we say goodbye a few weeks from now. This is the best part of the work — watching it become itself.

For a little more on Mussorgsky, Viktor Hartmann and the experience of translation, check out this blog entry from Kathleen Benton.

The picture above was made the other night at Whitehall. Exiting the subway I was momentarily caught by the blue-fire broken pavement and the wet neon city. I was surprised and almost stepped right through it. But pausing at the top of the steps, rain in my face, my commute transformed to clarity and an ordinary moment converged with a momentary awareness. Elevated, my mood eased, I breathed deeper and watched myself walk into the terminal.