Response to "White Clematis" by Harold Knight

[ted]

Last week my wife and I spent a day at the new Auckland art gallery. Although it is now a beautiful building I became somewhat downcast. When it comes to the visual arts, despite having a love of abstract beauty, colour and form, I am afraid I cannot muster much response to a bottle glued to a lavatory seat or a huge black background with childishly daubed words on it - even if these things are worth millions and acclaimed by millions.

Those paintings of the older masters which were present, beautifully executed of course, I assumed had been chosen by the one person, as they all exhibited singularly gloomy colour and lugubrious subject matter. Then I saw this, although the website thumbnail gives no idea of the  overwhelming, visionary, living quality of the light, full of intensity and implication, in the original. I stared at it for a full fifteen minutes.



Later on I made this recording with the picture in mind. I forgot to turn the phone off and it was interrupted, but at least the lady keeps some of her enigma.

[pianowolfi]

How extraordinarily beautiful this is, how lively and joyful! I am tempted to call it "a Ted impressionistic" because it has this oscillating, floating and "colourful" character of the impressionist music but it is definitely "a Ted" as well, like all your improvs 

It makes me think of the sheer beauty of the world and remember it, and it makes me see it from a different point of view.

I love the relations between different art genres, and I have also done improvisations on paintings before, it's a really fascinating thing to do.

[ted]

Pleased you like it, Wolfi. I have always made a point of avoiding direct inspirational stimuli in order to improvise or compose. This and the cliff photos are probably the only two examples. I wouldn't want my playing to depend on being inspired because, as we all know, it doesn't happen very often. Associations and images sometimes come and go during playing and retrospectively when listening but they are neither necessary nor sufficient for either me or the listener.

Out of curiosity I looked at the many paintings by Knight on the internet. Many of them are similar to this one, having a subject of a woman in more or less domestic and mundane surroundings. However, they all have this miraculous, almost surreal and intense depiction of light. His wife was actually more famous than he was as a painter, it seems.

Beauty is vital to my music. I wouldn't trouble myself to play sounds which, at least to my own ears, perhaps only to my own ears, were not in some sense of the word, beautiful.