Praeterita

Meditation on Franz Kafka

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 04:00:00 PST

After a Christmas hiatus, here is number 94 in this series of 100 short talks on art and artists. Yes, Franz Kafka was an artist, occasionally.

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Anabasis: Journey to the Interior: Diary 1/24/12

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 04:00:00 PST

Drypoint on aluminium, 7" x 5"

"It was hard to breathe, pressed so tightly together against the fleshy walls, our two tiny forms bathed inside and outside by the amniotic fluid, deafened by the hammering thud of a heartbeat, tantalised by the distant sound of music and voices."

Text inspired by writer Patricia Ann McNair's daily journal prompts. Prompt # 16: It was hard to breathe.

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Film of Barbara Hepworth

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:45:00 PST

Just over three years ago, I visited St. Ives in southwest England when Patty was teaching over there. One of the wonderful treasures there is the studio home of renowned sculptor Barbara Hepworth. She died in the 1980s (I think) in a studio fire, which is rather grotesque. The house has no trace of that tragedy, however. Instead, you can see her tools and her workshop, the beautiful Cornish house, and wander the lush gardens, built on a steep slope, and littered with her distinctive sculptures. Here is a picture I took in the gardens, with a very typical middle-aged English couple (and a cat) wandering around:

And here is a short film from the marvellous Tate Channel, shot at the house, and containing some recently discovered footage of the Dame in her studio:

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Anabasis: Journey to the Interior: Diary 1/18/12

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:12:00 PST

Neo-color pastels

The boys liked to stand with their faces turned towards the sky, near the old church, down in the dene, as the hawk sprang from its nest, sailed in a wide arc towards the smaller birds, and brought its prey to earth in a splash of blood.

(Text derived from writer Patricia Ann McNair's writing prompt series. Prompt #6: "The boys liked..." )

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Anabasis: Journey to the Interior: Diary 1/16/12

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:57:00 PST

Derived from writer Patricia Ann McNair's daily journal prompt: Prompt #4, January 11, 2012: We were never sure what happened.

"We were never sure what happened. They say the army jeep slid on some ice and went out of control. They also said the driver was drunk, and didn't notice how close he was to the truck right in front. The man fast asleep in the passenger seat never had a chance. The personnel from the army base who were charged with giving us the news said that his body was badly scarred and burned from the accident. An ID had already been made, so there was no need to go through the trauma of seeing him in that state."

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Anabasis: Video #1

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 04:30:00 PST

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Anabasis: Journey to the Interior: Diary 1/11/12

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:08:00 PST

The day is beautiful, o do not be afraid.
They have only gone for a long walk.

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Anabasis: Text # 1

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:40:00 PST

Inspired by author Patricia Ann McNair's 2012 writing prompts. Number 1: On Another Winter Morning.

"On another winter morning I might not have gone to the firing range. It was Arcticly cold, the wind slicing down all the way from Scandinavia and across the North Sea, arriving at our village with an audible whistling, whipping up plumes of snow from the fallow fields around the mines. But Grandad liked shooting, and he said he wanted to teach us, so on a Saturday morning in January my mother piled me, my brother, and my grandfather into the Mini, and we drove to a place about an hour north of the village. I remember a long low building, walls sagging slightly, a dark interior, and the tinny ‘crack’ made by the low caliber pistols. My mother and my grandfather paid their fee, put on the padded earclips, and went up to their allotted firing station. Each station was really one long countertop, separated into booths by flimsy partitions. My brother and I were told we could go in and watch, but we had to stand back, stay still, and stay quiet. My mother and grandfather joined the rank of people taking potshots at targets twenty feet away. The building was unheated, and it was as cold inside as it was outside. I squeezed my mittened hands into my armpits to warm them up, and stamped my feet to try and get some feeling back into them. The floor was so cold and my feet so frozen that it felt like I was standing on ice without any shoes. I looked up at one point to see my grandfather looking at the targets that he had reeled in on the wire: almost all of them bulls’-eyes. His face had a strange look, which I knew was related to the mining accident he had been in many years ago. His back had been crushed in a roof collapse, and though he recovered his strength and most of his mobility, the damage to his spine had left a curious after-effect: whenever he became excited or emotional, his eyes would cloud over, his jaw would go a little slack, and his head would fall slightly forward like he was nodding off to sleep. As he looked at the result of his near-perfect shooting, I couldn’t see his face, but I saw the dip of his head and knew that he was pleased to the point of near-ecstasy. My mother turned and asked if I wanted to have a go, but I was suddenly afraid, and I was colder than I had ever been in my short life, and I shook my head. Grandad was disappointed, but didn’t say anything. Only a little longer, I said to myself. Soon they’ll be finished, and then we can go home. Maybe when it’s not so cold we can come back, on another winter morning, and my grandfather can show me how to hold the pistol, and how to use the sights, how not to be afraid of the noise and the recoil, and I can shoot well for him, well enough for me to look up and see the cloud of happiness fill and then vacate his face."

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Anabasis: Photo # 1

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 09:24:00 PST

I want to take a photograph of the past. I want to capture the streaming photons of a long-dead event. But what lens could I use? Which direction would I point the camera? How long would the exposure need to be? Supposing such a piece of equipment existed, what would I end up with anyway?

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Anabasis: Journey to the Interior: Diary 1/6/12

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 04:30:00 PST

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Anabasis: A Journey to the Interior: Diary 1/5/12

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 05:00:00 PST

"Surrounding the mining town where I grew up were mountains of coal, rising like ziggurats against the grey skies. Some of them were so big they had smouldering fires buried deep within them fires that never went out."

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Anabasis: A Journey to the Interior: Diary 1/3/12

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 04:00:00 PST

"A journey into the undiscovered country, the cavern deep inside the mountain, the labyrinth where monsters lurk, the cave at the ocean's floor, the door into the attic, a place of secrets, a place of danger: ourselves."

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Anabasis: Journey to the Interior: Diary 1/2/12

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 04:00:00 PST

"I dreamed about a swirling vortex, a whirlpool of black water that filled my field of vision entirely, and as I dreamed I felt that I was being sucked towards the gaping tunnel, whirling around in descending circles, pulling me by the legs until I could no longer resist and finally sucking me into its dark, terrifying maw as if I were a fly being flushed down a sink."

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It's 2012, and it's Florida

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 04:00:00 PST

Well, this is my first blog post of 2012, and I'm still in Florida. Not much art to see here, but plenty of pelicans, cormorants, seagulls, black skimmers, ospreys, herons. I made some art of my own, in a sketchbook and with some NeoColor crayons that I brought along. These two were each done in a couple of minutes, from a boat sailing around the bay at St Augustine:

It's an opportunity for me to do some observational drawing, which I used to do a lot more, and which I only seem to do in vacations like this one. It's fun to keep my hand in (particularly as I am about to start teaching my drawing class again soon), even if my studio work is not really like this.

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On the goals I set myself for 2011, and how I did

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 09:54:00 PST

It's the first day of the new year, 2012, and I spent the first part of it taking a walk on the shoreline of Vilano Beach, Florida, with the fog rising off the Atlantic Ocean and all kinds of birds swooping and circling above the waves. Technically, I spent the first minutes of 2012 standing on the balcony of our rented house, a glass of wine in my hand, watching some fireworks scattering in the air a mile away. On my morning walk, I took that picture above of a starfish, and I am trying to think of a way to make it an emblem of a new year. Maybe this creature, like a star, lights up the way forward in the darkness of night, leading us towards an unknown and yet promising future.

Hmm. In the first blog post of a new year, it's the custom to look back as well as forward, so I've retrieved my post from a year ago, reviewing the completed and unfinished goals from 2010. The link is here:

http://philiphartiganpraeterita.blogspot.com/2011/01/on-goals-i-set-myself-in-2010-and-how.html

And the list of things I wanted to accomplish in 2011 was as follows:

Get the mailing list up to at least 200 useful names (I find this the hardest thing to do, probably given that I haven’t really made sellable work for a while).
Get 500 postcards printed and sent out to the museums, galleries, art consultants and potential buyers on my mailing list.
Start sending out a newsletter.
Take a class at Columbia College Chicago (I get a discount as an adjunct faculty member).
Obtain at least one more public art project.
Meet a Chicago museum curator.
Get at least one gallery and one art consultant to handle my new work.
Create a printed and online PR book about me and my work.
And by the end of 2012, earn all of my (very very small) income from art and art-related activity.

I've only done one of those things, shockingly: obtain another public art project. And it was a good one -- the Envision 365 grant from the City of Urbana. I think one reason that I didn't tick more of them from the list is that they are things I could do in a day (like the online PR kit), and of course I just kept postponing that day until the year ran out.

On the other hand, there are things I achieved in 2011 that were not even on that list, and which are a good substitute for the list unachieved. For example:

Obtained more teaching gigs, which puts me on the road to the last item above (earning all of my income from art related activity).
Starting to post regularly for Hyperallergic.com (and by the way, they pay for each post).
Meeting and interviewing even more artists.
Completing The Lucerne Project and discovering the possibility of future collaborations and residencies.
Being invited to be one of the earliest users of G+.

The last one was totally unexpected. It didn't even exist until June or July, and like many people, I liked the idea of it but didn't get the point of it at first. But in just six months it has transformed how I use social media, put me in touch with lots of very interesting artists who I intend to meet in real life, and opened up a way for me to completely change how I blog. Oh, and indirectly it led to my already being offered a show at Art on Armitage, a cool non-commercial gallery in west Chicago, in August 2012.

My aims for 2012, therefore:

Complete the 2011 list!
Get another public art project/grant.
Use the G+ Hangout feature more.
Gradually make G+ my main blogging platform.
Obtain a residency for one month or more.
Start going out again to Chicago art openings (mainly for Hyperallergic, partly for my own ends).
Go deeper into the 'personal narrative' aspect of my recent studio work.
Work on an 'Artists of Praeterita' group show.

Fingers crossed. Ready? Then I'll begin.

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Meditation on Ana Mendieta

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:51:00 PST

Number 93 in this series returns to the subject of Ana Mendieta, about whom I talked in my last post for Hyperallergic.

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In the Studio: Day 79

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 05:30:00 PST

I was really hoping that I would get 100 full days in the studio this year, but evidently could only make 79. I did lots of art-related activity outside the studio, of course: the Lucerne Project; the Urbana public art project; writing for Hyperallergic; writing this blog.

Anyway, on my last studio of 2011, I started adding some of those acrylic collage shapes (dots, in this case) to a drawing/painting on paper that was a mixture of watercolour, acrylic paint, and airbrush pigment:

Nice, n'est ce pas? Let's see if I can make my mind up about all this in 2012.

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Praeterita Interviewees Interactive Map

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 11:00:00 PST

View Praeterita Interviewees in a larger map

Here is a Google Map that I've created, showing the locations of all the artists and writers I've interviewed on this blog in the last two years. Each push-pin locator also has a link to that person's interview.

I intend to add other things to this map, starting with photos of the artists' work.

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A Place, a Person, a Name

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 09:28:00 PST

I was going through a folder of photos that I took during a summer that I spent in Prague in 2007, when this one caught my eye. Prague is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, with its medieval castles, old monasteries, maze-like central streets with no logical pattern to them, churches with eastern-looking onion domes, red-tiled roofs that spread out like a sea of terracotta when seen from above. Maybe I took this picture because it didn’t fit with that mental image I have of Prague, because it’s so ordinary, untidy, even dirty. On its own, it could stand as a suitable alternative to the picture-postcard view of the ancient city. If you look closely, you can see laundry hanging from windows, and weeds growing up between the cobblestones in the yard. It was the middle of the day, but the young woman lounging on the chair has the look of someone who has been sitting there for a while, with nothing to do. Maybe she had many days like this, to go by the look in her eyes. The chair she is sitting on looks like it’s seen better days, and her clothes look cheap, perhaps bought from one of the bargain stalls run by the many Vietnamese immigrants in the Czech Republic. There’s nothing really remarkable about the photo at all, except perhaps as a study in the average, the banal.

Now let me tell you where it was taken, and see whether it changes the meaning of the picture.

I took it when I was in Theresien.

Theresien is the prison camp north of Prague that the Nazis used as a staging post for prisoners, mostly Jews, who were being shipped east to the death camps in Poland. What we now call ‘Theresien' comprises an old stone fortress, in 50,000 people were penned together in tiny barracks and cells that were only designed to house 7,000; and the ‘new’ fortress, a mile north, which the Nazis used for an exercise in monstrous, cynical theatre. Within its walls was a small town, with plain but pleasant stucco-covered buildings from the early nineteenth century, a central square with a town hall, and cobbled streets. Richer, more educated Jews were kept here, and families with lots of children. The Gestapo invited the Red Cross to visit this small town to demonstrate how humanely they were treating their Jewish guests. See how well they live! There is a school for the children, an orchestra for the adults, reading circles, kitchens. They are so healthy that they will even play a soccer game for you (you can see all this on the propaganda film in the museum). And then, once the Red Cross left, almost every man, woman, and child who lived there was eventually transported to Auschwitz to be murdered.

Look again at the photo I took.

The camera was dangling at my side. I had just left the museum, where I had learned all those facts I described above. I had watched the films, read the letters, pondered the heart-breaking drawings of the children. As I walked along the street, I passed the archway, glanced to my right, and noticed the young woman in the courtyard. Until I saw her, it simply did not occur to me that anyone still lived in Theresien. That whole generations of families had passed their lives in those rooms and buildings which had once housed the victims of the Nazi genocide. That people had been born, grown up, gone to school, played in the street, fallen in love, got married, made love, died a natural death, done all the things that happen in the course of an ordinary life – and that they had lived out their lives where thousands of people had been held captive, before being shot, beaten or gassed to death.

I can’t blame the people who were put into this place after 1945. Can you? But I look at this picture again, and I try to imagine what I would do once I found out the history of the place. I might be too poor to move anywhere else, but I can’t imagine being unaffected by this horrific past. I pity that girl in the photo, and anyone else who still lives in Theresienstadt. In a small way, they are still living under the pale shadow of suffering cast by a much greater darkness.

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In the Studio: Day 78

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 06:00:00 PST

Playing with more dried acrylic collage shapes:

Some time after Christmas, I will probably have a new phone with a camera that's better than 1.5 megapixels.

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Meditation on Caravaggio's 'The Taking of Christ'

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 04:00:00 PST

Number 91 in this series is about colour and eyes.

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A Student Wrote to Me ...

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 04:00:00 PST

... and told me something very gratifying to me personally. He said that he took one of the stories that he started writing in the Story in Fiction and Film class that I taught this semester, and turned it into the following fake movie trailer. He shot it last weekend with the help of friends and peers (he's a Film and Video major). His name is Noah Kloor - remember his name when the 2015 Oscars (or thereabouts) come along.

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In the Studio: Day 77

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 04:00:00 PST

I'm arranging all the acrylic collage shapes into one giant mega-collage, and thinking next about gluing them onto a panel or canvas (click the image to see larger version):

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Interview with artist-writer-artist Lynn Shapiro

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 04:00:00 PST

Lynn Shapiro with one of her hand-made books

Lynn Shapiro has a fascinating resumé: Juilliard-trained professional dancer, drama coach, writer of fiction, writer of a column for "Dance" magazine, and lately a maker of artist's books. She is also one of my colleagues at Columbia College Chicago, and she is just one of the loveliest people you could ever hope to meet. I started the interview by going back to the beginning of her career.

PH: How did you first become involved with dance?

LS: My father was an avid dancer. In fact the whole family, led by my grandmother, would often play popular records and dance together in the living room after dinner. Their favorites were Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Glen Miller, and various calypso tunes.

I loved dancing with my dad. Every night, when he’d come home from work, before dinner or anything else, we’d play my favorite song, what I called “Fernando’s Hideaway,” and dance together, my little feet riding on top of his shoes.

He and my mom loved classical music—opera and symphonies mostly, but they had records of all the great ballet music, too, like Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite” and “Swan Lake,” Delibes’ “Copelia,” Chopin’s “Les Sylphides,” Offenbach’s “Gaitee Parisienne,” and Prokofiev’s “Sleeping Beauty.”

Music drove me wild. If music was playing on the phonograph, I couldn’t sit still. The music made pictures for me in my mind, gave me a world of stories I made up and had to act out in movement. I would dance by myself for hours, living out the drama that music stirred in my body.

Heaven only knows what my parents were thinking when they took me to the ballet for the first time when I was three years old. I know I was completely hooked on dance by then, but so are a lot of little kids. We had to drive for an hour to get to the the Civic Opera House in downtown Chicago. The New York City Ballet used to tour there every year, and that year, my first exposure to ballet on stage, I saw Maria Tallchief dance “The Firebird.” It was a heartbreaking story of a prince who falls in love with an enchanted bird he is hunting. In the middle of it, I cried out, in full voice, “She loves him!” My parents shushed me, but the audience laughed at my passionate outburst. After that, I knew I wanted to be a ballerina when I grew up, and would stop at nothing to reach my goal.

I begged for ballet lessons. Fortunately for me, my mother had read somewhere that children shouldn’t start formal dance training before the age of six, and for good measure, she made me wait until I was eight, when she finally located a competent teacher in the suburbs. From then on, I trained to be a dancer. When I was old enough to take the train to Chicago by myself, I began studying at a professional studio, going every day after school, and Saturdays. That led eventually to New York, Juilliard, The Martha Graham School, and my first professional job dancing in New York, then later in Chicago. I danced professionally for twenty years.

PH: As a writer on dance, what range of dance forms interests you?

LS: I’m most interested in concert dance choreography, whether ballet, modern, jazz, or tap. By concert dance, I’m referring to choreography as an art form and virtuosic dance. Today, there’s so much cross-over of idioms, you see all those forms merging.

PH: What was the process that led you to Columbia College’s Fiction Writing Department?

LS: It was really through theater that I got to Columbia. From the time I could hold a crayon, I had always written—stories, poems, plays. I began journal writing when I was ten, after reading “The Diary of Anne Frank.” By the time I was in high school, I had begun experimenting with text in my dance compositions. Right out of college, early in my dancing career, I had a marvelous opportunity to develop a dance curriculum and teach at The Latin School of Chicago. There I was lucky enough to collaborate on theater productions with the drama teacher, a graduate of Goodman. I choreographed his productions, and then, under his guidance, began writing dance dramas—plays that integrated music, dialogue and dance—for the high school students to perform for the Lower School. They were so well-received, we even toured one of them to several magnet schools in the city.

Latin School led to a teaching job at Goodman School of Drama (now known as The Theatre School, DePaul University) where I taught movement for actors, choreographed productions, and continued writing plays, learning theater craft on the job.

Still dancing, I continued writing for theater, eventually collaborating with The Maxwell Street Klezmer Band to adapt Yiddish folklore to theater. Together, we created seven Klezmer musicals that toured the Chicago area and the Midwest for twelve years, our most popular being “Hershel and The Hanukkah Goblins,” which toured and played annually to sold-out audiences at North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie. It became sort of the Jewish Nutcracker.

Front left: Lynn Shapiro in the 'Jewish Nutcracker'.

Several of the Equity actors I worked with were involved with Piven Theatre Workshop, so I decided to check it out. At Piven, I studied Story Theater, a form of theater performance that lifts literary fiction directly off the page and gives it legs. Developed by Paul Sills and his mother, Viola Spolin, the originator of “Theater Games,” Story Theater completely captivated my imagination. It was a perfect blend of everything I loved—literature, movement, script, and a style of acting based on impulse, discovery, and visualization. I found my writing taking off in new directions from the work I did with my teachers, Joyce and Byrne Piven, who had been part of the original Compass Players that spawned both Paul Sills Story Theater and The Second City.

By the time my knees started giving out, and it was clear my dancing days were numbered, writing had become the artistic anchor of my work, and I began looking for a way to develop myself further as a writer, primarily of plays, I thought at the time, but of stories as well.

I didn’t have a graduate degree when I began teaching at Goodman, but twenty years later, I couldn’t expect to resume college teaching without one, so I began looking around for a program that would meet my interests. The Story Workshop Method taught at Columbia’s Fiction Writing Department sounded like the Piven’s approach, and I decided to try Fiction I as a summer course. I felt an immediate artistic home in the department and applied for the graduate program for the following fall semester. The rest is a continuous wonder and discovery.

PH: What are you working on in your writing?

LS: I’m in the middle of a second draft of a novel, playing around with several new short story starts, and developing an artist’s book version of a story I wrote last spring. In addition, I continue writing for Dance Magazine (link here).

excerpt from 2020 Broadway, a novel in progress:

No music. My back is a vine pushing up through earth, penetrating light, a new life being born. My fingertips shoot silver filaments into the air pulling strands of hair, eyes, lips into the light, lifting me up until my limbs unfold into space and reach beyond, infinitely beyond. An extended leg carves a tunnel through opaque light. I enter the tunnel, pelvis first, then ribcage, then shoulders, then head in a glorious backbend, arms and hair trailing behind. My spine snakes upright, the momentum tossing an arm overhead, lingering on suspended breath, I lean into space until my weight gives way, my torso rounds forward. An elbow catches the movement, pulling me the opposite direction onto one leg, off-center, a shoulder, torso, head, wrist, hand, fingers, the other leg extending to the side, higher and higher until my body is stretched like a starfish, touching five distant points in space, and when it can reach no further, snap! Gravity zaps me into a lunge, a plunge, a dive, it would consume me but I use the energy of falling to pick up speed and I’m off! Runrunrun leap! Again! Leaping, falling, gathering breath, a spiral turn, arms whip an invisible lasso around my body, head follows, body arching through space, upside-down, inside-out, the room flies past me, into me, across my eyes, spinning, a twisting evolution of spine and legs, I’m sure, I’m steady, I’m in the center of my center, riding the energy, sweeping the audience into my world. I’m alive! And then, slowly, life begins to ebb. The circles narrow. Energy wanes, until my body is confined in the small pool of light that began my dance. My fingers reach up one last time. The light begins to fade, I feel their breath hovering, and for once I’m not alone.

PH: You’ve also begun exploring visual art recently, particularly the artist’s book. What connections do you see, for you personally, between these different art forms of dance, writing, and visual art?

LS: I’ve always enjoyed drawing, especially dance and movement, and I illustrated most of the stories I wrote as a kid, but I never took my drawing seriously. Then, as a faculty member in the Fiction Writing Department, I learned that I could take any course tuition-free, so I took “Journal & Sketchbook” last spring, thinking that would be a fun thing to explore. Little did I expect the creative explosion that has set new work in motion. Keeping a sketch/journal, I discovered that drawing actually requires me to activate physically in the same way that dance does.

Lynn Shapiro, artist's book

More importantly, my response to stimuli of any kind is first and foremost an impulse to move. You have to move in order to draw, and I recognized the connection between seeing and internalizing what I saw as a kinesthetic impulse that transferred to the page. That happens when I write as well. Drawing became the glue between writing and dancing, so that whether I was drawing or writing, I was dancing on the page. It was a joy to be able to integrate my impulse to dance with writing and drawing. Now, I am exploring the seamless flow of visual imagery and text, not “illustration” but a true integration of storytelling through both mediums. The artist’s book is almost like a miniature theatrical set upon which I envision dance and spoken text. That has yet to happen, but it’s certainly a brew I’m stirring.

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Happy Birthday, Beethoven

noreply@blogger.com (Philip Hartigan) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:29:00 PST

It's the anniversary of Beethoven's birthday today. The local classical station is having a Beethoven day, but so far I haven't heard this, one of my favourite piecse of music: The Kreutzer Sonata (Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Major, No, 9). This is the beginning of the second movement, the variations, played by Martha Argerich and Gidon Kremer:

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