Last Candle, my vision for the replacement finale of Beethoven's opus 130, 20x40 inches, $1300
of gods and smoke
Here it is, the final piece in Last Quartets, and the largest piece I have ever made! It is also the most complex, using new techniques as well as some I haven't played with in a long time.
I used a jigsaw to cut out elements that extrude from the canvas like rococo era furniture, a technique I want to use a lot more in the future.
Funny enough, while this is basically what I saw when listening to the replacement finale of Beethoven's opus 130, I concur that the music itself doesn't have much to do with this vision...except for the train. I swear I hear a train fading off into the distance in it, though of course those hadn't been invented yet.
However, while this collage doesn't have much to do with the music, I think it refers to the nature of life itself.
Last Candle at an angle, with my dad's popcorn truck in the background. Yes, that's for sale too!
On the bottom we have a birthday cake, which is also a stage. Two fish, a pink salmon and a rainbow trout, are trying to climb back up onto that stage where a catfish lady and a bass gentleman speak their lines.
At the top we have the realm of the gods mirroring the play going on below.
A pink salmon dressed as Thor chases a rainbow trout Loki as he tries to flee to the moon. A catfish wears the headdress of a Greek god while a bass wears the headdress of an Egyptian one.
The bass god is absorbed in the chase of Loki, while the Greek catfish is trying to save time from the weird fish bellied limbo it has fallen into.
The cake below is earth, where we are all playing our part in the great play...or maybe it's a video game.
There has been speculation for centuries that we might live in a simulation in any case.
In between heaven and earth we have a ghostly sea filled with shades and spirits, but it's also filling with the smoke of our passing lives.
Only one candle on the birthday cake remains lit, life is flying by.
Clearly, my unconscious mind saw this last piece of music that Beethoven finished as a bridge between earth and heaven, and this collage is the result.
Smoke is often used as that bridge. This is why we burn incense for gods and loved ones in spirit. But what about birthday candles?
It's the same idea, that the smoke from the candles carries our wishes to heaven.
Apparently it was 18th century Germans who invented the tradition of birthday candles on a cake. At first the idea was to light up the cake like the moon, but then they added one candle for every year you've been alive and had you wish on them.
But the Germans got that idea from ancient Greece where cakes were lit up like the moon and offered to the goddess Artemis, the smoke from the candles bearing their prayers up to her. Maybe it would help to think of Artemis when making your birthday wish.
I think of music as being a similar bridge between the worlds, not necessarily as a means of conveying prayers, but maybe.
Rather, I see the music of the past as a powerful form of energy, a current connecting us to the souls who created it, and to the culture from which it sprang.
Maybe that's why I have this practice of calling up dead composers for a conversation. Their music seems to act like a convenient telephone number.
Thanks to the meditation with Beethoven on this quartet movement I was able to pin down what kind of creatures inhabit this collage and settled on fish.
Likewise, the image of the stars in the sea, which featured in that meditation, always bears a connotation of "as above so below" for me, and this collage is just another way of stating that.
No doubt the gods have their hijinks just as we have our little dramas down here, but do we act for their entertainment?
Maybe, but I see life on earth more and more as a video game where we are the gods pulling our own human strings for some mysterious reason.
Why? Maybe our spirit is bored, maybe we're scientists working experiments on the power of love, maybe we have karma to burn off, maybe we're into S&M, maybe we just want to make art with the inspiration of earthly limits.
I've been seeing Beethoven's quartets as fish: vulnerable creatures springing from the emotional waters of being, devourers of time when our days have become too painful to endure.
So, as this quartet movement snuffs out Beethoven's final candle, what is left to say but...
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
