Painting While Dancing, Part 2: How I Got Into This

Live painting was a curiosity to me, bizarre and insignificant, until last summer, when I finally got to see it actually happen. I had just moved to Boulder from Lawrence, Kansas, where I had been working as a scientific illustrator. Colorado seemed fertile with opportunity, but I was crazy from coasting on my last few hundred dollars while finishing an online degree program and recovering from what may or may not have been the flaming crash of a three-year relationship. I was teetering like a drunken meadowlark on the fencepost between manic exuberance and a panic attack, when my buddies from Lawrence drove up and took me out to the Red Rocks Amphitheatre to catch Sound Tribe Sector 9 (STS9) in concert.

STS9 is the flagship of a recent musical movement called "livetronica," an integration of traditional band instruments with electronic music elements, manipulated as it is happening, on stage. Although artists had been playing around with "live PA" set-ups for years, a full marriage of traditional and emerging technologies only happened a few years ago, when laptop music production software like Ableton Live suddenly made it possible for artists to do all of their soundsculpting in realtime, while recording, under the heat of stage lights. Live turned the laptop computer into a legitimate instrument, and one of the first bands to capitalize on this was Sound Tribe, for which computers perfectly complimented their already-quasi-electronic breakbeat drumming and trance-inducing guitar patterns. (You can find features on their use of computers in concert here and here.)

But that's all pretext for me to explain how the band's reputation for innovative syntheses led them into partnerships with other performance artists, to augment their already-dazzling concerts. The most famous of these is Kris Davidson, a painter whose works have morphed over time from pretty but somewhat prosaic geometrical diagrams:

...into vivid, layered, and organic dripping scapes reminiscent of natural history illustrations and mycelial microscopy:

The point is that Kris D was painting with STS9 when I saw them at Red Rocks last September. And for the first time in my memory, I got to watch someone paint and dance at the same time. I showed up for the second night of a two-night run, so the evening began with what looked to me like a finished painting on stage...and then Kris spent the next three hours burying it in washes and strokes that systematically and repeatedly redefined it. What started out looking like a wall of cubes became a sprawling cityscape, then the face of a mechanical goat, then a spray of tribal warpaint. The painting was breathing and dripping, shifting and blooming, while Kris dashed in for a few quick brushstrokes before retreating a few feet to gain some perspective. He bounced back and forth in a wide stance, perched on the stage with the ready tension of a bowhunter and the easy, casual hips and shoulders of a track runner.

There was something playful, almost flippant in his back and forth: the springy rave dancer with eagle discernment swooping in to exact some measured micro motion and then yaw back out into loose-limbed and watchful bouncing. And back and forth in those oscillations all night. It was an exaggeration of the double-moded painter stereotype, juiced into a higher octave by the uptempo beats and epileptic light show. Ah: this is the difference between painting alone at home, and painting on the receiving end of ten thousand intoxicated dancers. The incredible intensity of Red Rocks - literally, built over the bones of indians and dinosaurs, and channeling thousands of watts of sound between two ruddy monoliths that thrust up from the mountainside like heaving whales - that energy was rushing down onto the stage and through that brush into the painting.

While my own ass-shaking had merely bled heat energy into the mountain air, Kris D funneled that same vibe into a haunting and mysterious work of art:

Here was someone who wasn't merely doodling in class, or cooped up at home with his canvases and cats. Here was someone who had managed to shine, to really shine, in front of thousands of people, without being a member of the band - a rockstar painter who musicians request to goof off with them on stage. Here was someone who got to play pro at some of the best parties in the country and had found an audience for his work that studio artists can scarcely imagine. Here was someone who made his living by painting while dancing.

And that's when I started taking live painting seriously.

(Written for iggli.com)

The Soundtrack To Your Funeral, Part VI: Takin' Life So Serious

(Image from roadkilltshirts.com.)

As I've said before, the soundtrack to your funeral is as personal a playlist as you'll ever make. Assuming you have the luxury of deciding what to play to your mourning crowd (and assuming that you have the luxury of a mourning crowd), the funeral playlist is your final opportunity to give a life-affirming message that helps people deal with their grief and conveys the sum of your wisdom in a personal voice.

If it's not clear already, I take this responsibility very seriously. But then, I take everything very seriously. I was born under a Capricorn Sun (on 8 January, same day as Elvis Presley, David Bowie, and Stephen Hawking), and have recently come to appreciate the full significance of this: Capricorn is ruled by Saturn (aka Kronos), the god-devouring Lord of Time and the home planet for intense gravity of both metaphorical and literal varieties. Capricorns are saturnine, heavy, pragmatic, associated with bones and the skeleton, earthiness and history.

And so it comes as only a little surprise that I became a paleontologist, only to shift my attentions to the study of time itself. Little surprise that I was so deeply drawn to Boulder, Colorado, where I now live in the shade at the foothills of the Flatirons and play in a band called Ethereal Underground. Little surprise that I paint bones and eruptions, that I've abandoned the notion of delusion in favor of "practical versus unpractical realities," and spend so much time thinking about the unconscious as if it were geological strata.

Little surprise that many people can't tell when I'm joking, and that I can't tell when they are joking, either. I experience my own feminine compassion as an expanse of drought-cracked and fire-tempered clay, stoic and willing to soak up the spilt blood of human suffering in an ancient, patient embrace. Even my jubilance comes wrapped in rough gauze, a romantic appreciation of the grinning skull, a stealing of each moment's blooming flesh from the bare jaws of transience. Historically, astrological Saturn presides over the 1st House (incarnation) and the 8th House (death): gravity and graves, you know.

And therein lies the incentive for me to make sure that one song in particular is not left out of my funeral playlist, Ash Grunwald's "Serious."

Ash Grunwald - "Serious"

Now, sometimes I act like a fool
With those dark clouds and worries inside
When we live small lives that are way too short
And don't need no reason why

We've gotta stop takin' life so serious
Stop takin' life so serious
Stop takin' life so serious
You don't even know what you have

Sometimes I worry about the future
Are we ever going to find our way?
I don't even realize that we're living in the Good Old Days

I told you, stop takin' life so serious
You don't even know what you have

And your mind can get stuck just like Ararat*
Dangled carrot of desire in your head
Now your heart feels just like a bowling ball
Have you listened to a word I said?

I told you, stop takin' life so serious
Stop takin' life so serious
Stop takin' life so serious
You don't even know what you have

(*I'm not entirely sure that this is what he says, but it makes sense.)

I refuse to accept the assertion that we can only appreciate what we have when it's gone. I have in vivid memory a thousand moments of lightness that pull me out of my well again and again, reminding me that this is just as much "it" as anything else.

If I really do have an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of those who survive me, I hope it's by lightening their hearts. I hope it's by shaking them with the urgency and intensity of my good humor, shaking them out of their time-wasting sad sack nonsense into a larger perspective that floats in the vastness of our world and cannot help but respond to it with play.

And what better way than with a riotous uptempo slide guitar song growled out by a man named Ash? There's something in this about fighting fire with fire, the irony of such a bouyant message coming in the form of such a stern declaration. It appeals to my saturnine self, striving for something sillier. It speaks to my inner fool. It jumps on the bed until I bolt upright laughing, half indignant and half hilarious with surprise.

And it rocks. Which pleases me, of course, being an Earth sign and all.

(Written for iggli.com.)

Painting While Dancing, Part 1: Hello Wednesdays

Every Wednesday night around 9 pm, I drive out to the Trilogy Wine Bar here in Boulder, Colorado, where my friends Jantsen and Alala have a weekly DJing residency. Together, and with a rotating crew of talented guests, they pack the evening with a variety of electronic subgenres.

As little as a year ago, what they do would have sounded like some kind of alien language to me: dubstep, breakbeat, crunk, glitch, technofunk, whomptronica... And this is music that somehow I've discovered I enjoy - a lot - even though unrelenting doubletime drum breaks over inarticulate gangsta rap and shotgunned with the squealing of deconstructed sound clips is something from which I once would have run screaming.

But no longer. I really enjoy this stuff, now. And I'm sure that a big part of it is that I spend each Wednesday night communing with this music as deeply as possible. I'm not just there to dance; I'm there to paint. It makes a difference, to be part of the show.

Trilogy is split into back and front rooms. The front is a classy, somewhat upscale wine bar and restaurant (a giant triangular wine rack fills the wall behind the bar, in honor of the triplet sisters who own and run the place). Tasteful techno-buddhist paintings on wooden panels accentuate the subtle intensity. Their happy hour is a $5 bottomless glass of wine between 5 pm and 7 pm - an incomparable deal, in this town, and a major boost to their favored reputation. Evenings usually feature some DJ tucked away into one of the corners on a mobile PA system, playing the music that wine-drunk club girls in shiny heels invariably grind to - good for dancing, but typically unremarkable.

A tight squeeze past the couples lining the bar along the North wall and down a narrow hallway brings guests to the back room, which is a totally different creature altogether. Exposed black rafter beams strung with a dozen different brands of Christmas lights hang high over the grimy concrete floor. Soft wall lighting casts long low shadows on the navy walls. A liquor bar, the mirror image of its sister on the other side of the kitchen, sprawls dozens of bottles in front of a smudged mirror. Giant red drapes hang between two fake potted trees on the stage, which is normally a mess of unused stage monitors and snaking cables.

This is unequivocally the best small venue in Boulder. Any band that draws more than fifty and less than three hundred people calls Trilogy its home away from home (and it's popular with some acts that draw far more, on nights when the party spills out into the front room and a video feed is projected on the wall for a second-class audience). The sisters are well-regarded and the notoriously feisty security staff is actually pretty nice, once they get to know you. Bartenders are smiling and loose with the drinks, and the water cooler by the door only occasionally runs dry.

But Trilogy's real claim to fame is its sound system: A moat of subwoofers arranged beneath two massive, monolithic speakers that hang from the ceiling like landing spacecraft frozen in flight. Halfway down the South wall is a mixing board with more knobs than could ever be employed by any band capable of fitting on stage, operated by soundmen made half deaf and half drunk from the power of the equipment. It's a rig capable of unleashing a tsunami of sound and lighting up venues ten times the size of Trilogy. (Thankfully they never run it at full volume, but some of the engineers are obviously more deaf than others. Conversations don't come easily at Trilogy.)

And so. Every Wednesday night, I trundle out into the evening, park along the painted brick walls next to the alley side door, and tote my easel and materials inside to render the night and its noises in paint. This is my job. I work here. Painting while dancing.

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For upcoming entries in this series, I'll share some of the impressions and the inner process of live painting, as well as recount specific experiences and offer photographic play-by-plays of select paintings as they unfolded over the course of an evening. Stay tuned!

(Written for iggli.com)