New Short Film: "Brush on Wood"

"Brush on Wood"
AD, images, words, and music
©2014 AP Durkee. All RIghts Reserved.

The brush poems and painted segments in this short film were calligraphed by hand on iPad.

Autumn Arrives

Moonrise over fields, September 2012

Illustrations and illuminations. It's good to celebrate the turning of the Yearwheel. Mabon is the Autumn Equinox, in the old religion on the old calendar. Continuing with explorations of art-making on my digital devices, creating digital paintings and illustrations, and panoramic photo-montages.


Mabon Blessings 2012

Last year I gathered leaves falling from the trees out back in a wicker basket and did a photo shoot with them. This year I took one of these images and painted over it on my iPad, to make this illustration for celebrating the equinox.

I also used some clip art found on the Interweb to make this illustrated poem for the autumn equinox. Fires and memory. Burning piles of fallen leaves. The harvest moon. Cold nights, clear days. All those things that mean autumn in the temperate zones.



Then I went back to my original illustration and made some typographic art from it.



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Autumn is arriving early this year. It's been an extraordinary year for weather, with a drought and a summer full of record heat, and this fall all the leaves are turning a full month early.



The fields are already harvested; due to the strange summer weather the corn crop was stunted and unhealthy, and partially failed, never growing very tall except in some scattered fields. Now are already brown, or plowed, the hay mown and gathered, and everything ready for winter.



The maple trees are already turning bright colors, although some other species are holding on to their green. Until the dryness in the air turns them directly to brown, with no moments of splendor. The fall colors are already half-over though they've barely begun.

Painting: Digital

Another aspect of painting that I've been exploring is digital painting, using various apps on my iPad. I find this to be very rewarding, in part because I can work quickly or slowly, save and come back later if necessary. There are some paintings I've been working on for awhile, some others made with the quickness of a Zen lightning flash across the mind.

At the high end of software apps I'm using, with amazingly flexible and editable tools, are ArtRage and ProCreate and ArtStudio, all of which allow you to create full art on your tablet. Another couple of favorites, which are a little idiosyncratic and less purely about painting are Flowpaper and ZenBrush. I have several other drawing and painting and sketching apps, but I find myself using this group most often. ArtRage and ProCreate in particular are the ones for painting using my own photographs as reference images. A lot of the images I'm creating are sketches, just five-finger exercises. I don't consider many things here to be finished art. Although a few are, particularly those new paintings I've made from existing photographs.

This style of painting, of painting-over, of making art based on photographs, is something that strongly appeals to me. I make new art from existing images, not by reproducing them but in fact by refusing to reproduce them exactly; rather, by creating a new version that is more abstract, more painterly, as if a plein air painting done on the inspiration of the place and time where I had made the photograph. Many landscape painters have used photographs as references for their paintings. In my case, I am using photos as reference, but also in some cases as source material: painting over the painting itself, sampling the colors, and working the image till it evokes a more abstract mood and style. A fresh painting made in a new mode. I feel that this mode is the best, most actually artistic, of what I'm doing with digital painting for now.


Moonrise, 2012

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A completely different kind of visual art that I'm doing is combining writing, calligraphy, and drawings of various types. Little visual haiku. Precedents in Japanese haiga, which are paintings with haiku, not really illustrations but a combined artform. Brushwork on painting, on photography. Blending media. Layered imagery and words.



Haiku are a quick form of poem, something that happens spontaneously and with clarity of mind, out of clarity of mind, or not at all. Likewise these little visual haiku.





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Since the ZenBrush app is specifically designed to emulate Japanese brushwork and writing, I find myself doing that with it. It's good for sketching, but also for writing a haiku, then combining that with artwork in a painting app. ZenBrush has some flexibility in terms of brush size, opacity, ink style, touch sensitivity, and so forth; it also has a wide range of virtual papers on which to write or draw. As usual, I often start a brush session by warming up by drawing enso.



An enso can then be erased, drawn over with new layers with different opacities or types of sumi-e ink.



Another app I use regularly converts visual images into images composed of words and type. This is fun to play with on the brushwork and Zen fronts: adding layers of meaning by adding randomized type-casting to the brushwork image.





Here's an example of a sumi-e style drawing, which I then experimented with in terms of both type and painting. Several different versions of this one idea yield different, even playful variations.


river, carry me home, 2012





A completely different kind of feel can be made with the same process in the same apps. (These were drawn on the smaller screen of the iPhone.)





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The aesthetic of this kind of calligraphic painting/drawing, even though it's done on the latest type of computer, is ancient in feel. I made that explicit with this morning poem.



These are all examples of the process of painting, calligraphy, and drawing using virtual paint on a tablet. They range from serious fine art paintings, using the high end painting apps, to small morning poems and drawings done quickly and simply. Different aesthetics for different moments and different ends. But they are all digital painting. I'm doing a lot of this work right now. I'm drawn to it, in part because it's something I can do during my morning meditation time. Not all of it, as I said, is anything more than studies or exercises; yet I feel there is a great deal of potential here for creating genuine art, real illustration, and more.

To be continued. We'll see where the road takes us next.

John Cage Centennial: New Music for Prepared Piano

The John Cage Trust has released a cool prepared piano app for iPhone and iPad, called CagePreparedPiano. It contains samples of a piano prepared using the same exact materials that John Cage used to create his Sonatas & Interludes for Prepared Piano, one of his most famous works. It's been recorded several times, including recently by Adam Tendler, who offers a full performance for free download.

I spent part of John Cage's 100th Birthday today writing and recording two new little prepared piano pieces in homage, using the prepared piano app.

The first Cagean "Sonata" is a single movement in three parts, recorded playing my iPhone.



AD, prepared piano app

The second "Sonata" is a three-movement sonata, preformed using my iPad.



AD, prepared piano app

Truly this app is a remarkable homage to Cage, in that it carries his compositional ideas forward while also teaching the user something more about the man, his music, and one of his major inventions, the prepared piano. It also allows the performer to capture some of Cage's wonderful sense of humor, in that exploring this app was tremendous fun. Also in the spirit of Cage and indeterminacy and constrained improvisational performance, there is a randomizer button that shuffles the samples on your playing surface, creating an entirely new set of sound possibilities each time you randomize.

Ocotillo Flowers

Ocotillo Flowers

At Joshua Tree National Park, where I camped for two nights, there had been a relatively wet fall, so many of the cacti were blooming this mild winter. The ocotillo grove, which is one my favorite spots in the Park, had several stands that were flowering. Long conical red flowers at the ends of the long cactus stalks, some of the stands covered in small green leaves. Ocotillo are dramatic, standing up to 20 feet high, stalks growing from a central taproot point. They bend to the prevailing wind over time, giving them a windswept look even when the day is calm.

I made this drawing on my iPad, with the ArtRage app, using one of the photos I made that afternoon as a reference image. Still, I like the more impressionistic result. I didn't try to be too realistic about the background, or the area around the ocotillo, suggesting more than depicting the surrounding dirt and stands of sage. Still, anyone who's been to the Southwest will recognize the colors, the sky, the desert scene, and the ocotillo.

I did this drawing in several layers, exploring the app's Layers feature for the first time. The cactus and its sun-shadow are foregrounded, while other layers were built up for the sky, the distant line of mountains, and the foreground dirt with its loose jumble of rocks. I used several different tools this time, two different kinds of brushes, pastels, a little airbrush, and the paint roller. I like broad strokes for this kind of drawing, and I think the paint roller made an interesting sky gradient, built up in several thicknesses on different layers. more subtle to create than the end result appears. This kind of drawing/painting painting is about underpainting, building up color in layers, so that subtle effects show through. It took me awhile, but I like the finished result.

Saguaro Moon

A classic image from the Southwest of my imagination. A place I will be in reality, just a few days from now.

This is a drawing, rather, a digital painting, I made on my iPad this afternoon, using a sophisticated painting app called ArtRage. I made this painting in about ten or twelve minutes, as I was waiting while the shop installed new tires on my truck, prior to my upcoming roadtrip.

I really like the ArtRage app, which is the most intuitive and flexible painting software I've encountered in years. It provides a wide range of adjustable drawing and painting tools, all customizable and adaptable, along with a range of paper textures, effects, and other illustrative processes. There is even the ability to use a reference photo as tracing paper, or a guide. One can work on several layers, too, so that transparencies can be built up non-destructively. i find myself able to paint and draw things easily and quickly, using a stylus, in this digital domain, that frankly I would not be able to do in the real world. (That's partly because I'm chemically sensitive, or rather allergic, to many traditional artistic materials, including aromatics like turpentine and other agents.)

For this digital painting, I mostly used a flat watercolor brush, paint tube and roller, and a sable brush, changing the color and settings for saturation, etc., several times during the painting. I found the tools easy to figure out, and using the stylus came naturally. I guess teaching myself to draw over the past years has had some benefits, after all.

Songwriting: Making a Demo

Recently I finished composing/writing a new song, for myself to sing at a fundraising event in March, called "The Power of Love." I auditioned the song for two of three artistic staff for the event, but the third person couldn't be at that audition, so I was asked to make a demo version of the song. That's mostly so they know how to program my song within the larger context of the fundraiser concert: where to put it, what it's mood and tone are like, etc.

Well, naturally I said, sure, I'll make a demo. Not having made a studio demo for some few years, nonetheless I was willing. For two reasons: first, to complete the audition process and assure my performance slot for the concert, and also to give myself the pleasure of a new creative challenge in my recording studio.

Now that I seem to be a songwriter as well as a composer, I suppose making demos will become more common for me. And I believe I will keep writing more new songs, now, both to keep up the compositional momentum, and to continue to grow as a writer. Words and music: that's going to be phrase on my new business cards.

I'm about to leave for a month-long roadtrip. It's time for my annual trip to the Southwest and to California, cameras in hand, writing journal nearby. I've been packing for this years' trip, organizing objects in a new system. Since the video camera I will be taking this trip is smaller and lighter than previously, I will be able to walk farther, and take longer hikes, with just a shoulder bag or smaller backpack. My strength during my post-surgery recovery has reached levels unseen for a decade, and I feel up to hiking a mile or two to get a good image. There are trails I know about that I haven't been able to attempt, which I feel able to do now, this year.

One of the bags I packed is my creative arts bag. It has pens and colored pencils, a couple of back-up notebooks for writing in, some drawing and watercolor paper, a few ideas sketched out to work on more later, and a few other things.

I have every intention of writing more song lyrics, or maybe a new art-song for voice and piano, while I'm on the road. As I've written before, it's become obvious to me that I do best when I am always making art, always writing. So the creative arts bag also contains some song lyrics that I wrote last year that I have yet to set to music, and a spiral music composition notebook, for writing music of whatever kind comes forward to be written.

I will probably take along a couple of my more portable musical instruments. Maybe my Stick.

Most definitely my newest musical instrument: my iPad, which is turning out to be a source of great creative possibilities for me. I have lots of photography and video apps on there, but the most useful apps so far have been musical tools. I have already used the iPad as an important computer-music source for an album I recently composed of music for meditation and healing.

All hail Rockmate! All hail GarageBand!

With these two iPad apps, I spent a few hours over the last couple of nights laying down basic tracks for a demo version of "The Power of Love." I have yet to record the vocals; which I'll do tomorrow, as it's late at night as I write now, and I'm too tired to do a good job singing. I will also probably lay down piano and/or classic Hammond B3 organ tracks, just a few bits here and there to give the demo some life and depth. Those also will likely by done with the soft-synths (software-based synthesizers) that I have in my recording studio.

Making a demo is about making a rough recording of a song to give a sense of what the song is about. It's not meant to be a final recorded version, it's not perfected or produced to the same level as an album track. Demos are meant to get people to listen to the song, and see what it's about. When you play a demo for a record label or a producer, it's always at least partly about auditioning your work for them, to entice them to work with you, and release your music as a produced album. Lots of demos never get any further than that, and that's fine. Lots of songwriters produce demos that get their toe in the door, which are then re-recorded.

I am making this demo to present the piece for concert performance later. But it can also serve as an introduction to my new activity as a songwriter. Being a songwriter these days usually means being a singer-songwriter. I don't have a lot of self-confidence as a solo singer. Maybe that will develop over time.

For this demo, I laid down some rhythm guitar tracks first, following the song's chord structure. Then a few fills of guitar lines in places where a short solo might fit. I don't play guitar, and have no real experience on or feel for the instrument. Rockmate was extremely useful for laying down the guitar tracks.

Next I laid down some bass lines, using an upright bass softsynth. I basically played a jazz bass line by hand. I'm a bass player, my first instrument after piano was upright bass, which I began playing in orchestra at age 13. (I was small for my age when I began playing bass, and the instrument dwarfed me for a couple of years.) I chose a jazz bass line, albeit a groove-based rather than freeform line, in part because in my mind "The Power of Love" is not a pop song, but a jazz-inflected folk-rock song. That's how I hear it in my head.

The drum tracks were actually the easiest to do. I basically used the SmartDrums feature in GarageBand, synchronized to the metronome click track I was using for the demo. I used a classic studio drum kit, useful for both jazz and pop music. Again, I programmed the drums to be more of a jazz than rock style, but with a strong backbeat. Once I synced up with the metronome click track, tracking the drums was the easiest of all, for this demo. All I had to do was make little variations in the rhythms, and fills, to keep it sounding organic and live. the software already does this well, but you can also tweak it on the fly, while it's playing, to make the sorts of stylistic and volume changes typical when shifting from the verse to the refrain.

This demo song, which I expect to be able to complete tomorrow, isn't going to be a perfect performance, just a heartfelt one. Demos aren't about perfection, they're about presentation. Of course you do the best that you can, given the time constraints, and in this case given all the other things I need to do before I leave on my upcoming roadtrip. I have no doubt that when I perform the song live in concert, a month or so from now, I will not only perform it better than on this demo, I will know the song better. Self-confidence in performance involves knowing your material really well, everything memorized and internalized. So I plan to take my Stick along in part so I can keep practicing and learning this new song that I've written. First you write it, then you have to learn it well enough to perform it.

And after that, who knows? Maybe more songs. Maybe a whole new writing project. Something to keep me creatively busy for awhile longer.