The visit came after a kind of perfect storm of circumstances in my life led me to recognize just how isolated is this small town in the middle of the grass plains of West Texas, high on the Marfa Plateau, dry and dusty and more often than not wind-blown – and I’m talking real wind, not breeze.

The nearest town of any size is at least three hours away by car, and that being pretty much your only option as without a car (as I was) you need to somehow get to Alpine, 30 minutes to the East, get on Amtrak to El Paso, and then what? You’re stuck in El Paso which is not the greatest place to be stuck.

Now I am someone with a very high tolerance for solitude, but there have been a few times this recent year where solitude has tipped into loneliness. That’s when I got on the phone and started calling friends in San Francisco and Santa Fe just to get a reality check, remind myself that I was connected to the larger world outside Juddville. One of those friends had recently moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area from Portland. She had told me her story of her difficulty forming more than the most ephemeral of relations there. This is someone I have known for a very long time (she was my studio mate in my first studio in San Francisco) and whom I have always trusted for her insight. She has also visited me in Marfa a couple of times. Her comment about my feelings of isolation were that, hey, I had moved to a town that is not only very small but is peopled with an unusual number of introverts, which makes sense given the nature of the place. Marfa is also a town of eccentrics (I include myself as both an introvert and an eccentric) and the people you hang out with are the people whose eccentricities are similar to your own.

As with other places I have lived, San Francisco and Santa Fe, the locals can be fiercely loyal, so it is not without some trepidation that I write this post which might ruffle the feathers some card-carrying members in the Myth of Marfa Party.

That said, driving back from Santa Fe I was looking forward to returning to Marfa. There is an allure to the place not easily put into words, but these two articles by Sean Wilsey give a flavor of the place:

“The Republic of Marfa,” McSweeney’s 2, 1999

“Marfa Revisited,” McSweeney’s 6, 2000.

Although much has changed since these were written, much has also not changed.

My favorite part of the trip back from Santa Fe starts when you leave Carlsbad (or Anus Mundi), New Mexico, and head into the Guadalupe Mountains. Maybe some day the caverns will swallow up the town and the desert will take over. At least, that’s my fantasy.

After coming down out of the Guadalupes, you hang a left onto 54, a small two-lane road heading east to Van Horn which is magical, inspiring, gives your mind a rest, as you gaze off across the vast, empty landscape of yucca and mesquite. At Van Horn, you turn onto 90 for the long stretch into Marfa on another two-lane road, the only town between Van Horn and Marfa being Valentine, now practically a ghost town (although this is where our dentist now has her office). As you drive home to Marfa on these two roads it hits you just how isolated is Marfa. And there is both a kind of joy in that, and also a bit of anxiety, one part yearning for this home at the end of the world, the other part urging you to turn around and head back to where you came from.

But when I finally pulled up in front of my house, I was glad to be home. Back with my dog, and my books, and my painting. A place where nearly everyone waves as they pass by on foot or in their cars, as if in acknowledgment of “we’re all in this together.”

Marfa. It’s a good place to leave and it’s a good place to come back to.

Looking south towards my street. Photo by Martha Hughes (marthahughes.com) from her upcoming book "Non-Iconic Marfa"

What I Miss (Mostly Food)

• A deli
• A good sandwich, especially a decent Reuben
• An art supply store
• Fresh pastry and good bread
• Spontaneous gatherings of colleagues at the local artist bar
• Good, inexpensive restaurants
• Water and green
• Trader Joe’s
• A local pharmacy

PS: My love to the three muses of Marfa National Bank: Josie, Laura and Linda.

The article is about artist Neil Harbisson¹, a color-blind artist, for whom Adam Montandon² created a device “made up of a webcam, a computer and a pair of headphones and created software that would translate any colour in front of me into a sound” — the eyeborg.

Montandon’s system is a microtonal scale with 360 notes per octave (one for each degree in a color wheel), the “Sonochromatic Music Scale.” ³

Image from Eyeborg article at Wikipedia

Several years later came Eyeborg 2.0 developed by Matias Lizana⁴ which transposed light frequencies (color) into sound frequencies, the “Pure Sonochromatic Scale.”

Image from Eyeborg article at Wikipedia

The harmonic progression, or proportion, looks like this:

a—b:b—c::a:c

the formula for which is:

b = 2ac/(a+c)

which results in the harmonic, or musical, proportion:

1, 4/3, 3/2, 2

where 1 is the fundamental, 4/3 is a fourth, 3/2 is a fifth, and 2 the octave above 1.

If you’re interested in a full discussion of the math behind this, see Richard Lawlor’s Sacred Geometry ¹. For a fascinating and in-depth history of how geometry becomes music and the development of our octave, see Richard Merrick’s Interference ². For my purposes, I’m interested in how this might get mapped to the color wheel, music becomes color becomes music. And when I began playing with this idea, it made more sense to use four primaries for painting (red, yellow, green, blue) instead of the traditional three color primaries (red, yellow, blue).

A short digression before I go on:

Color is vibration, as music is vibration. In the visible light spectrum color moves from violet (the shortest wavelength) through blue, then green, yellow, orange, and red (the longest wavelength). The difference between the colors of visible light (additive color) and the colors mixed for painting (subtractive color) can be charted as:

The primaries of additive color are red, green and blue; of subtractive color are magenta, cyan and yellow (even though this isn’t really reflected – no pun intended – in traditional color wheels or in most discussions of color theory). When two of the additive color primaries are mixed, these are called secondaries. The secondaries of additive color are the primaries of subtractive color, and vice versa. I find this fascinating.

But, as I said, I’m basing my colors for Fourths and Fifths on primaries of red, yellow, green and blue. I have planned three triads (triptychs) that will look something like this:

R → Y → G, where yellow is the fundamental and red is the octave below, green the octave above. The fourth of the R-Y octave will be a red-orange. The fifth of the Y-G octave will be a yellow-green.

And so on. Now it’s time to get into the studio.

References / Additional Reading

1. Johannes Itten, The Elements of Color (John Wiley & Sons, 2003)
2. Mark David Gottsegen, The Painter’s Handbook (Watson-Guptill Publications, 2006)
3. Paul Zelanski and Mary Pat Fisher, Color (Prentice Hall, 2003)
4. Lawrence D. Woolf, It’s a Colorful Life (General Atomics Sciences Education Foundation, 2000)
5. Ian Stewart and Martin Golubitsky, Fearful Symmetry: Is God a Geometer? (Dover Publications, 2011)

I left off with the arithmetic progression. Now for the second of the three: Geometric. Again, this is a three-term proportion where a > b > c. In the language of ratios, a and c are the extremes and b is the mean. As with an arithmetic progression, begin with two of the differences in the numbers: a—b and b—c. In a geometric or harmonic progression, these differences are to each other in the same way as one of these numbers is to one of the other numbers, not as one of the numbers is to itself as in an arithmetic proportion.

The geometric proportion is expressed as:

a—b and b—c::a:b

The solution for a geometric proportion where the mean term is b is b² = ac or b = √ac. Using this formula for the extremes of 4 and 16, the mean is 8. The geometric progression is 4, 8, 16. This proportion is also expressed as the golden mean:

a:b::b:c

If this were mapped to a color wheel, this could be two primaries (the two extremes) and their secondary (the mean): red is to orange as orange is to yellow.

With the Fourths and Fifths series, however, I am playing with the idea of mapping the musical proportion to color. The progression for the musical proportion, based on an octave, is 1 (the fundamental), 4/3 (a fourth), 3/2 (a fifth), 2 (octave above 1). That idea will be the third post in this series.

As I worked through the color relationships for the new body of work, I felt there might be some such relationship. In a previous post, The closed circle and the infinite loop, my first instinct was that the colors for the series somehow related to thirds and fifths in music. I now amend this to fourths and fifths after reading Lawlor.

This is based on the concept of “mediating proportions” – binding two extremes through a single mean term.

There are three such mediating proportions: arithmetic, geometric and harmonic. It’s the latter I’m trying to puzzle through (which means I’ll need to relearn everything I’ve forgotten about music theory). So between music theory and color theory is there a correspondence we can define and talk about? It’s all vibration, right?

And now the math behind these progressions. First, these proportions are all three-term proportions, a group of three unequal numbers where a > b > c. In the language of ratios a and c are the extremes and b is the mean. The relationship between these numbers is that “two of their differences are to each other in the same relationship as one of these numbers is to itself…” (arithmetic) or is in the same relationship as one of these numbers is to one of the other numbers (geometric and harmonic). The two differences here are a—b and b—c.

Arithmetic Progression
In an arithmetic progression a—b is to b—c as a is to a, b is to b, c is to c:

a—b:b—c::a:a, b:b, c:c

To take a simple example, let’s say the extremes of this proportion are 3 and 7. To find the mean, add the two extremes and divide by two:

b = (a+c)/2

The mean term is 5 and the arithmetic progression is 3, 5, 7.

Next: the geometric and harmonic progressions.

There’s this guy in town who puts his small dog in his white van every morning and evening and drives around town, the dog with his head out the window, ears flapping, and rhythmically yelping, sharp and piercing. Yelp, yelp, yelp, yelp… What the? Is this his idea of taking the dog for a walk?

I mentioned this to a new Facebook friend who asked about my practice and who, synchronistically, works with color and sound. He recommended a book to me, Interference: A Grand Scientific Musical Theory. I have worked some with interference media and am fascinated by interference in waveforms and cymatics, so I was intrigued. Also synchronistically another friend is working with fluid dynamics which as far as I know, and I don’t know much, is related to chaos theory. Everything came together in my mind in an ‘ah-ha’ moment where I saw the connections in all these, and then, of course, immediately lost it. Color harmony, musical harmony, symmetry in chaos…

I began reading Interference this morning. Besides rekindling memories of studying piano and the point at which the patterns my hands made on the keyboard were beginning to make sense, this is what struck me:

The Pythagoreans were searching for a unified theory of everything, just like some physicists today. What is the underlying harmony behind the veil of our senses which unites all phenomena? So they, the Pythagoreans that is, came up with the idea of stacking musical fifths, believing that “a stack of five perfects 5ths’ should close to form a pentagram at the third octave.” This is based on their association of the geometry of sound with certain regular shapes, in this case the pentagram, an important form in sacred geometry. Well, it didn’t work. Turns out there’s a gap. The circle is not closed, but is an infinite spiral, like the famous Nautilus. And so it’s my guess, at this point in my reading, that the gap is equal to the phi ratio.

Somehow in my mind this is all related to mixing colors. Stay tuned.

I’ve made a lot of noise here in Marfa about moving on and even posted here about it. Always on a quest to find that mythical place ‘home’ and never finding it. And then one day on one of my evening walks with Zack, my dog, I got it. I am home, wherever I am, I am home. This may sound quite simplistic and yet for me it had the power of a major breakthrough.

And so, here I am, still in Marfa, but differently. For the time being I’m at peace here. Berlin still beckons me, and I will probably travel there soon, but relocate? Meanwhile…

One of the essential questions, and I think especially so with monochromes, is how the paint is applied to the surface. I am now actively studying other ways and other vehicles for applying paint which will allow me to work looser and acknowledge the essential messy-ness of paint in preparation for my next series of work. It’s good to be in the studio playing with ideas. A welcome change from the pressure of creating a final work…and constructing a painting is hard work! I have found an artist who makes beautiful Baltic birch panels for me and I am developing a love affair with calcium carbonate.

The end result of this play will be a new series of paintings whose working title is “Seconds and Thirds” based on color theory. More later as the series unfolds.

More about this later as I plan to write about the process of getting from here to there in the hope it might help someone on a similar journey. But this post is called Learning German. I’ve been relying heavily on Google Translate built into Chrome. I’ve tried different plugins for Firefox and Safari, my browsers of choice, but haven’t found anything as good. Anyone out there have a tip, let me know. I can learn words, the tricky part is how to put them together. Apparently the Germans have a much different idea about this than us English-speakers. Besides translating government and real estate websites, I recently tried to find some background information on the musician Uwe Zahn under the pseudonym Arovane and discovered a very curious site, arovane.de, which cannot possibly be his website. The second page is all about the joys of having a ‘Balcony facility.’ Here is an excerpt from the translation results:

“The private balcony has become more and more becoming an important location of the apartment. On it you can enjoy the first rays of spring sunshine to take under the protection of umbrellas in the sun, in Hollywood swings wonderfully relax or spend warm summer nights with friends. Many people have discovered the balcony of their apartment for herself and enjoy the free time of the year like being there – mostly on sun loungers, swing chairs remain on balconies while lack of space, mostly a dream. With a beautiful view of the countryside it is not always necessary to spend their holidays away from home. Because even on the balcony you can drink cocktails and dreaming in the sun. Without much effort, it is possible to make the balcony with a beautiful patio furniture such as teak, plastic or aluminum, for personal oasis. Those who want it, the small accessories or give special emphasis to his balcony.”

Yes…even on the balcony you can drink cocktails and who wouldn’t want to give special emphasis to his (or her) balcony?