Emily, my daughter, has a birthday this weekend. She is a mom of two, a nurturing wife, and has three jobs, but these roles do not define her. It is her attitude, her daily walk and character that really turns a spotlight on her many accomplishments. In honor of her birthday, I thought this would be a good time to shed some light on our dual painting performance many years ago when she was only eight, a snippet of which you can find here.
To give a little background, our performance involved painting while the Evansville Philharmonic played “Bright Blue Music,” a contemporary and exuberant run through a rainbow of sounds composed by Michael Torke. If you have never heard the entire song, it is worth the twelve-minute ride and will leave you catching your artistic breath with its wild highs and lows.
Initially, I was called into a meeting with some of this town’s most reputable artistic sponsors and personalities. I can tell you I was a bit intimidated sitting at the table, wondering why I had been called in. Given that my art is a bit “out there” for this area, I assumed I had made created something that crossed some forbidden boundaries, and I had been called into be admonished.
Rather than be scolded for “over-expressing” myself, I was invited to participate in a new event with the philharmonic called the “Color Symphony,” I once-a-year tradition in which kids are invited to participate in the orchestra’s music in ways that might inspire them to produce future works of art of their own. My reaction to the invitation was to tell the panel that I thought they had picked the wrong guy for the job. I had no stage experience, I told them and thought their idea would be better served picking an actor, rather than artist, who could be more flamboyant and effervescing. Lucky for me and for Emily, my opinion was rejected.
Over the span of the next couple for months, I devised a way to paint with Emily where we both could work together and cover a huge canvas to the syncopated rhythms of the philharmonic’s“Bright Blue Music.” Emily was young, so I took some time to teach her to listen to the music’s soft parts, the crescendos, and silences. We practiced by drawing on long sheets of paper, speeding up and slowing down to the music and using colors that reflected the energy we heard as it changed in the song.
By the night of the performance, Emily and I knew every note.
As a nod to the found objects I use in my art, I had gathered old unusable instruments to hide in the orchestra. At predetermined intervals, Emily, dressed in her overalls, disappeared among the musicians, and returned to place the instruments on pegs on the huge gestural painting. Slowly, ebbing and flowing with the entire orchestra behind us, we kept pace with the imaginary colors we” heard,” and the sounds we “saw,” dipping our brushes into bucket after bucket of color. It was as if the spectrum flowed magically out of the song and filled the stadium. In that audience were hundreds of kids watching Emily, more excited than envious, dreaming of paintings they would create in their own future imaginative symphonies.
However, it was not the conductor who signaled the final note. At the end of the song, that master stroke went to Emily who placed the conductor’s baton on the painting as one last long note of an oboe faded. The music, so bright and so blue, shone over a little painter, my daughter, that day. Nowadays, Emily spends more time cleaning up after her two sons’ art, but somewhere in the background, I can still hear the bright music playing.