walnut drawing analogy/looping(?)

[Scott Hansen <scott-a-hansen@uiowa.edu>]

Title: walnut drawing analogy/looping(?)

avoiding cliches is good (in art and music).

dan-your drawing analogy is good, but to counteract your teachers

advice in drawing:

i believe the teacher was trying to address your ability question

perception and how you deal w/ abstraction and representation.

the abstract lines on paper worked in a certain way will somehow represent

the "perceived" world around us. the instructor was just getting you to

look harder: do you see lines around the walnut that define the walnut,

do you see texture/value that give the walnut volume. or in painting

do you see how the light/volume hits the different planes and make the

walnut 3-dimensional, etc.

my beginning drawing teacher told me way back in 1983, and he was using

a chair as the example: "we already have the chair, i don't need to see the

chair anymore, what I want to see is your interpretation of the chair" (paraphrase).

my MFA in drawing/painting 2 cents for the day.

i have no idea how that ties in w/ signal processing or looping.

s----

http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/452/hsacnostetn.html

> The last part of Richard's post, where he
> talks about avoiding cliche, reminds me of something a drawing teacher
> I once had pointed out:
>
> Let's say you're drawing a walnut and you want to draw the shell. You
> can start just automatically making a bunch of lines that you think
> will represent the texture of the nutshell. But are you really
> looking, and are you really seeing what the light on the surface of
> the shell is doing? Are you really being conscious about each mark you
> make on the paper being an attempt to communicate your true visual
> experience of the object you're drawing?
> -----------
> I feel the same logic applies to playing. I definitely get into
> automatic states where I am basically playing cliches of my own way of
> expressing-- this happens especially when I'm tired or don't really
> feel like playing. The only way I've found to avoid these automatic
> states is to do what amounts to a meditation where all thought between
> you and your instrument (e.g. whatever far-out rig you play) is
> redirected back into the instrument and the music itself. It feels to
> me like digging down and down and down in a moebius-strip like
> fashion, or like those celtic designs where the animals eat their own
> tails. I'm curious to know how other people experience this
> process.
>
> dan
>
> --
> ghost 7/ Oranje
> http://envelopeproductions.com
> d.ans@verizon.net
>
>
> on 11/25/02 8:05 PM, Richard Zvonar at zvonar@zvonar.com wrote:
> > At 7:43 PM -0500 11/26/02, Butch wrote:
> > >God, is this thread EVER going to die?
> >
> > Sorry, Butch.
> >
> > This thread . . . .  could go in any of several directions, but
> > the most productive
> > might be to try to identify how certain musical "gestures"
> > entered
> > our common language, how and when these became part of the
> > technical
> > tools we use, and how we can avoid sinking into endless
> > and repeating
> > sonic cliché.

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