The post for today is a great deal “sunnier”, both image and music selection, than yesterday’s. Not even I can be dark and gloomy all the time…
Not much to say about the image, except that it is “Summery” and bright with leaves gently fluttering in the breeze. A symphony in green if you like. Hence the choice of music: Webern’s early work of 1904, “Im Sommerwind” (In the Summer Wind). I had rather thought the piece pleasant enough but somewhat “slight”. On repeated listening I’m now not so sure. Whatever the case, the performance here sounds very well and the piece itself makes for relatively undemanding and highly enjoyable listening. Enjoy…
Anton Webern, Im Sommerwind, Idyll for large orchestra after a poem by Bruno Wille, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Pierre Boulez
Today’s piece was largely constructed from a “recycled” image of mine of an old and spectacular oak tree in Epping Forest, near my home. The treatment, however, was directly inspired by Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” (Transfigured Night), a piece of music I have always considered a little “overwrought” but nevertheless have a soft spot for. In keeping with my ambivalent feelings I have deliberately made the image here correspondindingly “over the top” with a vague touch of the surreal and expressing, I hope, the mixture of menace, even terror, with the magic and enchantment of the night wood. Not that I make a habit of wandering around the woods at night, you understand…
Arnold Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht, Op.4, Membres de L’Ensemble Intercontemporain, Pierre Boulez
After yesterday’s post I suppose today’s could not be more different. Both the image and the accompanying music…
The image above may look abstract but of course it isn’t. It is wholly constructed from blending and layering images of arboreal elements. My intention here, however, was that it should resemble an Abstract Expressionist canvas, particularly the Action Painting of Jackson Pollock. I think and hope it holds together structurally but, if it does, the use of purely natural elements has made it easy. There were few of the kinds of decisions needed in painting to be made here. You could say it all kind of takes care of itself.
Nevertheless the question arises: Does the result you see above still count as photography? For me, there is no question. It is wholly made up of photographic elements therefore it’s a photograph. The same question was no doubt asked of the piece of music I have chosen when it was composed in 1959/60 (some may still be wondering…): Is it music? Once again, for me at least, the answer is the same. I have no doubt it is…
Composed as I have said in 1959/60, this piece coincides with Abstract Expressionism, although by then the particular kind of Action Painting as produced by Pollock et al was fading if not yet completely passé. That Stockhausen was a pioneering genius is beyond question. Your opinion may of course differ…
An idea for a piece of work can often come in the strangest and most convoluted fashion…
Following on from yesterday’s post about Matthias Grünewald I was thinking about his great contemporary, Albrecht Dürer and the fact that both of Dürer’s grandfathers and father were goldsmiths. Indeed Albrecht himself was originally apprenticed to his father’s workshop. Of course this was not the eventual course his life was to take. However, remembering this caused me to remember too how on my many regular visits to the National Gallery, London, I had often been intrigued by the use of gold (sometimes paint, sometimes gold itself) that Late Mediaeval and Early Renaissance painters had made. In most cases this use would be overt and sumptuous but also, on occasions, a more subtle use of a sort of a painted golden “flecking” in dark areas would be made. Most often also this would be used in areas of dark foliage with the effect of imparting a sort of glow to the usually painstakingly painted (leaf by leaf…) flora.
One such work that has stuck in my mind is “Cupid Complaining to Venus” painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder, a favourite painter of mine, in around 1525. The gold flecking is most apparent in the lower left corner, though sadly not so apparent in the online reproduction I have linked to above! I also knew that the same painter had also made another work titled “The Golden Age”.
For this latest image in my current series I decided to construct an image reflecting, if only in mood and passing appearance, this practice. From previous pieces in this series I have made I am pretty much comfortable enough with the layering and blending techniques I use to know I can virtually create any image I want; given the right elements in the first place, that is. The image shown above is the result. At any rate the point I am making is, I guess, that a small idea can be generated, germinate and grow in the most obtuse ways…
Fittingly, the piece of music I have selected to accompany today’s post is from only slightly before the time the aforementioned Lucas Cranach was active. It is “Ave Maria” by Josquin des Prez, the central figure of the Franco/Flemish school of Renaissance polyphonic vocal music.
I have spoken before about the “imagined forest” and that is exactly what the images in this series are… “imagined”. They are of locations that don’t exist in any reality. Forestscapes of the mind; my mind, that is. Which means that, for me, they are more real than any actual location; sometimes it’s necessary to tell a lie in order to better express a truth.
In fact they are constructed from elements available to me by simply stepping outside my back door; and I live in London, in an urban location. These are images of an idea. An idea that not only can I summon up at will but can change the mood too at will. Interestingly, at first glance, the images in this series seem believable but on closer inspection their viability collapses. Such is the nature of fantasy, I guess…
Today’s image is perhaps more upbeat than usual. I would like to think of it as simply more “English”. In keeping with that notion I have chosen to accompany this image a piece by the English composer Michael Tippett, and aptly titled “Ritual Dances from The Midsummer Marriage”.
Michael Tippett: Ritual Dances from The Midsummer Marriage (1953) — BBC Symphony Chorus conducted by Stephen Jackson, BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davis
This latest image in my “Wald” series was directly inspired by a particular piece of music: one of Beethoven’s sublime late String Quartets, No.14, Opus 131, or rather the first movement, a slow fugue, which Wagner said, “reveals the most melancholy sentiment expressed in music” and it “floated over the sorrows of the world.” However, though indisputably one of the most melancholic pieces ever written, for me it is not dark and gloomy. Still and chillingly cold maybe but with a certain hard and brittle brightness most aptly expressed in the silence of the forest after snowfall with the hard, abstract shapes formed by snow laden branches…
The image I have used is a revamped old one but seems appropriate here. There is a deliberate resemblance to the abstract works of Jackson Pollock; the starker monochrome ones that is. The blue tint adds, I think, to the overall chilly feel that pervades the piece right through to the cold chill of the final chord.
Beethoven op. 131 string quartet # 14, Lindsey String Quartet
Some believe that the forest may have been the inspiration for Gothic cathedrals. Here they are alluding to the interior, imagining the columns as trees with their branches forming vaulted arches. A charming notion but likely not very accurate. For me, however, it is the exteriors of Gothic cathedrals that brings to mind the forest as I attempt to imply (albeit vaguely!) in the image shown above.
Thinking about the soaring extravagances of such buildings, however, immediately brought to mind the symphonies of Bruckner; “cathedrals of sound” as somebody once termed them. And so the piece I have chosen today is the 3rd Movement from Bruckners last and unfinished symphony, the Ninth. In many ways this can be taken as the “final statement” of this most deeply spiritual of composers. I have no way of knowing if, indeed, Bruckner heard the call of impending death but this movement, an adagio, most definitely has the feel of a “death tone poem”, as my friend Marc Yeats, with whom I share a deep love of Bruckner’s “sonic wonders”, put it to me. If this is so then it is ultimately not a gloomy or morbid intimation of the end but rather a life affirming one; transcendent and uplifting. Accordingly, therefore, I have made the image deliberately light and airy.
I should apologise in advance for the movement being split over two videos with, admittedly, a somewhat awkward transition. The performance here, however, is so good that there was really no alternative. Karajan and the VPO are at their dazzling best and, indeed, the conductor seemed visibly moved at the finish. A performance to treasure…
Anton Bruckner – Symphony No. 9, 3rd Mov. – Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Herbert Von Karajan (1978)
“Before the Norman tyranny, it was supposed, Britain had been mantled with the greenwood, a habitat where lord and peasant, thane and churl co-existed in prefeudal reciprocity – the one exercising his hunting rights with moderation, the other allowed the freedom of the woods to pasture his swine and collect the wood for his wattle and hearth… Greenwood was not… darkling forest where one lost oneself at the entrance to hell. It was something like the exact opposite: the place where one found oneself…”
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory
In contrast to the dark, Germanic “wald”, the greenwood of England has always been, in the native imagination (and largely in fact too), a far more welcoming locus. More Beatrix Potter than Grimm’s (and grim…) Fairy Tales. Both managed and manageable, a place of birds and bunnies, not wolves and bears. Of course it once was the latter… but long ago, unlike it’s German equivalent. Once upon a time both Germany and England were densely forested; two millenia ago, for example, Germany was 90% woodland (now around 20%) and England was originally much the same. But the wholesale deforestation of England occurred much earlier and, too, creatures like wolves and bears have long been totally eradicated.
So much for the actual facts, however. What is more to the point, as I have alluded to before, is how such forested areas as have survived are viewed in the respective national imaginations. English Romanticism, which flowered earlier than the German, was also always of a different order. More “romanticised” than “Romantic” (with a capital ‘R’). Less sturm and drang, more elegy. The English have always preferred to imagine some lost “Golden Age”, albeit largely mythical. The greenwood is a homely place whereas the Germanic idea of wald is always tinged with it’s opposite; the “unheimlich” (uncanny) and inextricably linked with the supernatural, the other-worldly “Sublime”.
Today’s perhaps lighter and airier images express the still sometimes dense but altogether more welcoming nature of the greenwood, I decided to use a “polyptych” format necessitating the use of a more extreme “letter-box” aspect ratio. I more or less appropriated the notion from my friend and sometime collaborateur, Anna Lee Keefer, as you can see here. I don’t suppose she will mind. Though I, of course, didn’t check in advance…
To accurately reflect my own notions about the “Englishness” of the greenwood I have selected for today’s post the piece “Elegy” for String Orchestra by Sir Edward Elgar which you can hear below. Obviously an old recording, it was conducted by the composer himself. Tinged with sadness, nevertheless it is an elegiac sadness rather than a heartbreaking one…
“Looking for light is a tyranny we can’t afford now.”
Anselm Kiefer
Two more pieces from my “Wald” series. As I observed in the previous post these obviously aren’t images of an actual forest but images about the forest. Images about the idea of forest; the Germanic “imagined forest” if you like. In the Teutonic imagination the forest is an ambivalent place. One of beauty and a dark romanticism, it’s true. But also a place where you can lose your way; or lose your mind. A place of sanctuary and protection but, too, a place of untold horrors, both real and imagined. Of course the imagined horrors are always the worst. Or nearly always… The dark, black forest (Schwartzwald) looms large in the Germanic imagination, as I have said before, but usually with romantic undertones. Then there is Buchenwald. A place of real horrors which can never be erased from the collective imagination of all humanity…
These images are not of the forest, as I say, but are made of overlaid elements to hopefully convey the experience of a dark and impenetrable place. As I have said also, some of the visual and conceptual inspiration for these pieces has been sourced from the work of Anselm Kiefer, amongst others. It kind of amuses me that the elements that go to make up the first of the images shown above are actually the stems of dead sunflowers. Particularly apropos here as sunflowers, especially dead ones, have been much used as a motif throughout Kiefer’s oeuvre…
Much of the non-visual inspiration for this series has come from music too. A particular piece that, for me, seems to best express my own thoughts here is one by my great friend Marc Yeats, “Shadow, and the moon”. I am not the only one to think so obviously as I note someone leaving a comment on Marc’s SoundCloud page has observed that the piece is like “wandering through an enchanted forest”. Enchanted, yes. But enchantment has, too, its dark side. Fittingly the piece has an underlying, albeit dark, lyricism but overlaid with darker, sometimes shrill, intimations of unknown fears and horrors. It is also appropriate, considering how the images were constructed, that, in Marc’s own description, the piece is a sort of “mash-up” of other earlier pieces of his.
Well, just listen to it and you will know what I mean…
I have recently started a new section to my larger project, Mythologies, which I have called “Wald” (wood, forest). My use of the German word here is for two reasons: In German there are two words commonly used in place of the one English words “wood” and “forest”; “forst” which, obviously from the same root as the English, means a managed wooded area whereas “wald” represents the wild and untamed forest of countless myths (the English equivalent would not be “wood” but the now disused Old English word “wold”). My other reason is because, perhaps more than for any other nation, the concept of “wald” looms large in the Teutonic imagination. Indeed former Federal Chancellor, Helmut Kohl once said “Mythology, Germans and the forest – they all belong together.”
Constantly in my research I came across the term the “imagined forest” in relation to German attitudes to the forest “motif” and that, more than anything, is how I see this particular part of the project developing. I’m no nature boy. Communing with nature is fairly alien to my solidly urban sensibility and so it is the “idea” of the forest or “wald” that I shall seek to explore…
My initial visual inspiration for this series has been drawn from the work of two German artists, Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer (interestingly “Kiefer” means “pine tree” in German), both of whom I admire and revere. There will no doubt be others. However, in many ways I have found myself more directly inspired by music and literature. Strangely, too, the most inspirational music for me has been that of the Finnish composer Sibelius and not more obvious Germanic composers. Maybe not so surprising: the Vikings, who basically feared nothing, made an exception of the Finns in their dark forests and would observe, “Finns have the power of darkness, Finns are wizards”. For me, the piece of music that most resonates in this respect is arguably Sibelius’s masterpiece, the Fourth Symphony, which you will find below (all four movements) for your listening delectation. The performance is a particularly good one, directed by a conductor who, as a Finn himself has a deep connection to the music.
I dedicate this piece to my Finnish friend and wonderful artist, Mia Leijonstedt. I hope listening to this piece may transport her to her beautiful homeland. Dedicated also to one of my very closest friends, contemporary music composer extraordinaire, painter and all round genius, Marc Yeats, who always does his best to fill in the alarming gaps in my musical knowledge. Enjoy…
Jean Sibelius, Symphony No. 4 in A minor Op.63, Swedisch Radio Symphony Orchestra, Esa-Pekka Salonen Recorded in 2000
My name is Ian Talbot and I am an artist and photographer living in London.
This blog is intended as an insight into the research, thinking and connections that precede the projects I undertake. I will also show new and experimental work. Naturally, not all of the work shown here will eventually make the cut. These are very much 'works in progress'...
You can see a complete collection of my work at my website:
