I first became acquainted with Eliza Rickman's very unique musical prowess when I was showing at the Hive earlier this year-accompanied by a miniature piano called a Schoenhut, and looking like a beautiful Burtonesque, Victorian, porcelain doll, her fragile allure belied the set that followed.
Kicking off with a potent version of Dear Prudence, she sounded somewhere between the mellifluous tones of Mary Hopkin and Siouxie Sioux, fed through a worm hole that plays the balmy side show static of tinkling pianola. This was to be no obscure karaoke act however, the retinue of songs that followed-with self penned titles such as 'Black Rose', 'Lily Love', Over Cold Shoulders' & 'Cinnamon Bone', revealed a delicate, haunting quirkiness to sanguine themes of bittersweet longing and friendships past.
She also posessed the kind of bohemian black eyed enchantment of every willowy French girl who ever sat outside a cafe clutching a Sylvia Plath novel that I was captivated by as an art student, with the exception that this lady had acres of true talent, actually read all of those books and was and is a true starlet in waiting.
Guild the Lily-her debut cd is available to download, and she is also playing here at the Ruby Room in San Diego on the 18th of December.
There is something 1970's panoramic about this piece-my mind keeps projecting Hockney, Led Zeps 'Houses of the Holy' LP cover, and the backdrops of 'Watership Down'.
As a kid of that era, it's all too telling.
Despite the fact that the scene is from Californian vistas of Big Bear, there is something really parochially English about the work.
As a kid of that country, it's all too telling.
Another thing, as simplistic as the composition appears, distinguishing the indestinguishable has been a tremendous challenge-trees obscured by a blizzards guaze have meant rendering oil paint as thinly as a watercolorist-layering in light washes.
I'm getting there.
I scanned an article somewhere recently, that said in times of great economic upheaval, artists flourish not financially, but creatively. The edict being one supposes, that freed from the constraints of commerce, the floodgates of Dionysian proportions are open. Given that I feel like I've been tapping the vein and catching the mainline to subconscious central for a few months now, I can concur that my creative spirit is high on the cocaine of the palettes whim, whilst I am literally on the bones of my skinny arse. Not for a want of the work however, no-nothing so more mundane than a stream of delinquent debtors, stretching my patience and my accounts to dust.
Madmen indeed.
Even on such dark days, the small act of working a few strokes on canvas, on something as ephemeral as a snow flurry or a clutch of scrawls in my sketchbook can raise my Titanic, reminding me that I was born to be an artist. There go I but for the lack of a living.
What a treacherous year-the shows are wonderful,heady even, but the betrayal of never selling anything leads me gaping over the precipice of ever wondering if at 42, the dream isn't just that-a dream. When I wonder, does one come to the cul-de-sac end of realising the devils of ones own failure? Smell the bitter coffee of defeat? I imagine when rejection siphons the soul of its last vestige of hope.
I recall something of an in joke at one agency I once worked (although they all merge into each other now) which went something along the lines that when ever there was a shortfall for a decent strap line, the words: " Time for a change:" would be a well placed warhorse.
Indeed-food for thought, but not on the table.
'If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad.'
Lord Byron
Fridays are my only concession to the mundanity of the working week, which is only ever punctuated in the evenings by occasional ruminations at my easel. On other days, I still feel like I'm merely faking it, a Sunday afternoon hobbyist inauthentically posing as the real deal, because the drag of scratching for a living at every other time, leaves me with a clutch of hours, fighting total exhaustion late into the dying candle of the evening.Fridays I afford myself the afternoons,locked in my studio-five hours of uninterrupted contemplation of paint-its like a enema for the soul.
With, the wintery timbres of Brett Andersons latest offing, en loop in the distance, the paint flowed like alchemy-I'm loving the new piece so much, it touches the innately unpronounceable chasm of living with a knowledge that someday it will all end, the awe of the nature and the passage of time. I can't wait to finish it.
Having laid down a light wash, and distinguished the details, I started to work in the background because I feel that as with the Valley piece, the geography for this piece,carries the same weight as the message. Previous deaths head pieces have been more informed by the concept, the background seeming something of an afterthought, although not entirely.
Its a process I'm learning to embrace more and more, I think for the longest time-perhaps too long, I've held a general mistrust of the real, believing that feeding entirely from the subconscious was the purest form of expressing-that to draw from life somehow diluted the idea. I still think that's the case-certainly with someone like Dali, the more technically he drew from the real, the less his work seemed informed by the surreal, but for me it feels like the work is becoming more cohesive and focused, evolving a germ of an idea into an entirely different animal. Its hugely exciting, and I've even taken to carrying a sketchbook everywhere and sketching, which always felt like somehow an attempt to elevate the mundane, but its something I am enjoying again.
the smaller study for this piece has gone through something of an evolution, certainly inspired by our weekend sabbatical in Big Bear, and having seen 'The Road' the other night. Despite the minimalism of this scratchy pencil study, putting flesh on those bones perse, is a hugely exciting prospect for me, encompassing everything I've longed to express about the bleak disquiet of winter, peering into murky icy waters seeing your breath dissipate in the cold air, and feeling the goosebumps through your soul.
I first became acquainted with Eliza Rickman's very unique musical prowess when I was showing at the Hive earlier this year-accompanied by a miniature piano called a Schoenhut, and looking like a beautiful Burtonesque, Victorian, porcelain doll, her fragile allure belied the set that followed.
She also posessed the kind of bohemian black eyed enchantment of every willowy French girl who ever sat outside a cafe clutching a Sylvia Plath novel that I was captivated by as an art student, with the exception that this lady had acres of true talent, actually read all of those books and was and is a true starlet in waiting.
