Shéhérazade

2 March 2023

Shéhérazade

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 27 February 2023, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

When I arrived the other night, the sky was so densely packed with colour that I simply looked at it and I felt like it had already been painted. All I needed to do was copy it like in a numbered picture book for kids. Everything was so ordered and the colours were so clearly delineated that it felt like I just copied it. Would that make it inauthentic or too close to verisimilitude? 

Each year I make a series of postcards at a great little print shop in town. Lovely people who know what they are doing with colour is a god-send. This one might make a good one. I sell them at a few places around the shire, but for me it’s just for vanity and some publicity. I’m still a big fan of snail mail in all forms but the price of stamps here is over the moon so I’ve had to curb my enthusiasm. And yet, I love to imagine these sea and sky pictures stuck on fridges from Taiwan to Pittsburg and Paris to Milan, I’m still an analog kind of guy.

I have been listening to Maurice Ravel off and on now for weeks on end. I can get into musicians this way. Tonight on France Musique, I listened to the soprano Christiane Karg sing Shéhérazade, a languid and darkly mysterious piece evoking the antique fable where just for once, a woman comes out on top. Suddenly, seeing this picture while hearing her sing put in me in a strange mood. It’s as if this image was painted expressly for this version of Shéhérazade. Even if it wasn't, how could it be I wondered? 

I’ll be honest, almost every interesting facet I’ve ever learned concerning music has come from  France Musique. In a recent podcast about Ravel’s life I learned that he was a teacher. Already an accomplished composer and celebrated pianist himself, he just really loved teaching music. Not unusual, but hardly normal for a composer with means, but time constraints also. One thing he wished most for his students, was for them, as artists, to find their own original voices. He valued it highly and he believed it was that one quality that made a good artist a really great one. As a painter, who could argue with that?

I’ve always liked Ravel, so I began working on a small piece he wrote called Prelude 1913. It was simple enough to imagine learning it. It was originally written for students to play as part of their entrance exams into the Conservatory in Paris. As I understood it, they were given this piece only an hour or so before the exam and expected to play it in a giant hall before the judges. It’s but a tiny fragment of a musical idea, just around 1:15 minutes long yet it embodies a host of ideas that seem to spring out of it like wildflowers. And like a pulse, after just a few measures into it, one can already hear Ravel’s own heartbeat coursing through its bloodstream. Any great artist or painter, writer, or composer, reveals themselves within a just the first few measures, brushstrokes, and sentences. It’s what makes them uniquely singular.  

And this is especially so for the painter, where a brushstroke acts like a fingerprint pointing to back to the painter. Even just a small fragment of a picture by Van Gogh can reveal his touch within the painted brushwork. And just like Ravel, or any original composer, classical, Pop or otherwise, a small detail of Vincent’s handiwork is quickly recognised by any astute amateur of art.

As a consequence, over the past year at the very end of each day, I’ve gotten into the habit of playing the Prelude 1913 before getting into bed each night. It’s the last act before sleep. After I’ve locked my doors, shut off the lights and brushed my teeth, I sit at the piano conveniently situated on the way to my small bedroom. There, I run through it a few times, stumbling here and there, because I’m really a crap pianist. Some nights it feels like a life sentence. I know it by heart of course, but knowing it well doesn’t mean playing it well. I struggle because it needs a soft touch and that requires a great supple strength in the fingers, something I lack. I often imagine I’m wearing a catcher’s mitt on my left hand. 

Listening to any bit of music one loves is an endless emotion. It has an easy way of getting under one’s skin and vibrate through one’s nervous system.  Imagine at any given moment around the earth, the billions of different melodies that people sing in their heads all at once. It’s one of those distinctive things that make us all human even whilst under the worst of circumstances. In fact, isn’t it a lot like laughter?