Prairie Dog Proliferation, collage and colored pencil on canvas, 12x12 inches. Listen to the music that inspired this piece.
You are a theme and variations
All that remains of the original vision I experienced for this piece is the colors and the theme of rocks. Why rocks? I don't know, but this piece really does rock!
This is the 7th and final bagatelle of Beethoven's opus 33, a presto in A flat major.
The more I listened to it I saw two more visual themes emerge: a bright flash of sun and a whole lot of prairie dogs.
The sun comes with the high twinkly notes over the pedal bass note, and the prairie dogs proliferate more and more as we build to the end, especially once the music becomes more chordal.
All together it gives the feeling of all your past selves staring you in the face in a blazing flash of enlightenment.
While the music takes us on a quick trip through some quirky, subtle, and very fast variations, the way we change throughout our lifetime is similar.
As time goes on we can't help but change, sometimes quickly, and sometimes slowly, but change is the only constant. We are all a theme and variations.
A prairie dog stands among the rocks, in a weirdly mountainous landscape where prairie dogs don't hang out, stunned in a flash of insight, wondering how they got here.
Each row of prairie dog heads gets progressively smaller as we look deeper into the distance. The shift is subtle, until it finally dawns on us that a change has occurred.
The fun thing with all the changes we go through is that if we believe in the theory of time that all moments are simultaneously occurring forever in different dimensions, then all versions of ourselves also exist at the same time.
I alluded to this theory here, and will do so again in the next project, and no, I swear I don't smoke anything.
This theory already exists in certain spiritual traditions, but quantum physics is catching up to the concept calling it "the block universe."
The fun thing with turning music into visual art is that it has to play with this simultaneous theory of time.
Music is time bound, it is a performance, but visual art on paper or canvas is not, at least not usually.
When I turn music into a visual representation it has to include the whole performance in one place, that whole span of time happening at once.
Sometimes this involves telling many different parts of a narrative all at once on one plane, each moment intermingling together, but usually it just involves an aesthetic juxtaposition of different important musical themes and textures.
Take a moment today to think about how far you've come! And if you have any advice for your past self what would it be?
How has your life actually been enriched by not knowing that piece of advice when you were younger? How did youthful ignorance turn into current wisdom?