02 Feb Lorna’s responses to “A Concert Conversation”
Lew and Lorna Program Discussion ideas:
Intro—conversation about Lew and Lorna’s relationship. How did you meet and how aware have you been of each other’s work? I was the first person Lew met in the Main House at MacDowell Colony when he arrived. I had been picked up by Lester, who drove too fast on those back dirt roads, because I had a call in the Main house. When I finished my call, there was Lew with a big smile, so I welcomed him. Right then and there we talked and talked; I lit a fire, thinking my painting was patiently waiting for my return. I do not even know if Lew will remember all this, but Taro does. One night Lew invited me and Taro for a midnight concert. We walked ½ mile on a snowy path through the woods to Lew’s cabin. He was so excited about his new piece that he built a fire in the fireplace larger than the cabin. When he sat at the piano to perform it, the piano keys were too hot for his fingers which jumped off the keys.
Frame—Stravinsky quote: “As for myself, I experience a sort of terror when, at the moment of setting to work and finding myself before the infinitude of possibilities that present themselves, I have the feeling that everything is permissible to me. If everything is permissible to me, the best and the worst; if nothing offers me any resistance, then any effort is inconceivable, and I cannot use anything as a basis, and consequently every undertaking becomes futile.
Will I then have to lose myself in this abyss of freedom? To what shall I cling in order to escape the dizziness that seizes me before the virtuality of this infinitude? What delivers me from the anguish into which an unrestricted freedom plunges me is the fact that I am always able to turn immediately to the concrete things that are here in question.
My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings.” Does this ring true for each of you? Is the literal frame of a canvas an important starting place?
Standing in front of a blank canvas, I may as well be in the maze of the Casbah, or lost in the dunes. I begin from nothing, staying flat instead of flying on through. I spend a lot of time just standing there, feeling my body in relationship to the canvas. When my arms reach out to apply paint, they come from my core strength. I have to believe in the reaching for something outside of myself. When I scrape away the oil paint, I reapply it and scrape again, many times over. I search for structure right away, through spatial relationships of color. What is the light from the sky on the mountains today? It changes every day, but solutions lead to more solutions; I can never quite get there, which is why I keep going after them.
Form—how are the works organized? Is the painting specifically representative, was it painted from an actual subject? En plein air? How did the trio take form and how were the elements organized? As close as I get to an actual subject is that I paint the seasons as they occur. The color harmonies reflect . e.g., icy cold, intense heat, as in “August Landscape.” All colors are mixed with each other for a specific temperature range of color, except cobalt blue, which is always sky, a breathing open space between all the other colors. The space flattens if the color vibrations are off; they must meet each other democratically. I don’t want them to scream at each other or be complacent. I want them to sing, to create movement between them. Sometimes the sky recedes, but at other times that same blue moves forward.
Gesture—musical and visual figures and how they convey gesture
How I place shapes together becomes the structure in the paintings: ‘(where’ they exist in space in relationship to each other). The picture plane in the paintings changes constantly through the volume that color creates, (in a constant state of relational movement). What one thinks is coming forward will then shoot back when in relationship to something else coming forward. That is called the plasticity of the movement.
Time—the differences of how a work is taken in—unfolding time as with music, versus the immediacy of a picture—but doesn’t looking at a picture give time for pause and investigation, an unfolding as well?
(Depending on Lew and Lorna’s thoughts, we might play some of the sections of the piece where material is presented at different tempo markings).
Any visual idea that shows up while I am listening to Lew’s piece takes me 2 months to paint. The painting may look as though it happened in one moment, which is what it should do. If you don’t feel the emotion and source of life in the painting, look at it longer, and wait. Root your feet in the earth and breathe. Go up close to the painting and then stand back, first to see the application of the paint and then to see how the painting’s unlike parts need each other to exist. Both Lew’s pieces and my paintings are complex and take time to hear and to see relationships which stir the heart and soul.
General question—What do you hope the audience receives, perceives, reacts to and experiences?
I hope that once the audience leaves that they still see the painting, hear the music, and want more of both. I hope the audience is curious about what creative process it took to make a work whole.
Questions from the audience