Music for opening the door to creativity

I was at an opening recently chatting with the mystical DJ Ciana* about music. I asked her favorite music for making art, the kind of music that helps you get in the flow and not ask the question, ‘Is what I’m making good or bad?’. Something shifts and the mind becomes a sort of open conduit for creativity and it’s the best feeling of all time. 

She immediately answered, ‘Of course, you want the frequency 528’. I had no idea what she was talking about. She explained that this is the frequency lots of the best songs of all time have. Plenty of Bob Marley tracks, Beatles and Jimmy Hendrix, to name a few. It’s the frequency of the heart. Listen to this music when you’re doing anything creative: writing, painting, whatever practice you get lost in. Check out a playlist of famous 528s here. 

One of my favorite painters, Danielle Mckinney, speaks about the importance of music while painting in an interview here.

In this interview, Mckinney explains, “I listen to music all the time when I'm working…it's a sound that creates these visual installations in the mind for me that I'm inspired by. I play a lot of music to produce feelings that come out of me onto the canvas.” 

She mentions Frank Ocean, James Blake, Thom York and Sade. 

I wonder if she’s tapping into this frequency too, the place where doubt has no place at the table. Our consciousness expands and creation seems almost effortless. You could also say this changes our brain waves to beta so we perform more optimally or however you want to define it. We can feel our feels. 

Lastly, there’s a specific style of hypnotic, upbeat dance music that I like to listen to when I want to dial up the energy. (picture me running up that hill) I’m thinking of two songs that both give me a sort of doomy, anxious feeling in my guts while also making me move, dance, and open a portal to creative thought. How can I describe this? I felt it when I was driving down a desert mountain with an ice storm blowing in fast from behind. Like death is tapping me on the shoulder, reminding me that I'm alive. It’s the feeling I get at the beginning of something momentous, or at the burning destruction at the very end of a chapter. I don’t know what frequency these songs are, probably an amped up version of 528, so I'll just call them the frequency of doom or the frequency of ten million.

The first is Venus Fly by Grimes, about 2:30 into the song there's a haunting, echoing violin sample that speaks to the second, The English Dancing Master, a dancing scene written by Claire van Kampen from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. The droney background sounds like a drum full of buzzing cicadas (prob an instrument called a hurdy gurdy, says Mac Barnett, who also happens to resonate with this song and listens to it sometimes when writing as well. 

*CIANA (also known as Alex Giardino) is a bilingual creative force: a writer, translator, event creatrix, and DJ who’s lived in Latin America, Italy, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Having reveled on dance floors all over the world, Ciana knows deep in her body that when we dance, we leave the mundane world behind and elevate to higher realms, where we connect, feel alive, and get free.

Here’s a link to follow DJ Ciana’s DJ collective here

and her SoundCloud account here.

A new painting: Only in dark, the light.

Moonscape with Box

21”X 17” unframed

Oil on canvas, 2024

Recently I’ve been thinking about darkness. By darkness I mean a few things. First, the despair I feel when I think about the recent political events and what's to come, the darkness of not knowing but having a sense of it, fighting fear and fighting the feeling of being helpless to change it. 

I’m also thinking of the darkness before the return of the light as the winter solstice draws near (read here- hope). The painting Moonscape with Box is a study of all this, the moon shining down on a wintery scrubland, silent and barren. In this painting I think of the box as the limitless mind and imagination. The objects in the box are wool from a lost Japanese sheep, a wing, and a celestial stone. Let me explain more, and also reference a hero of mine, the writer Ursula K. Le Guin.

Only in silence the word,

only in dark the light, 

only in dying life: 

bright the hawk's flight

on the empty sky.

-Wizard of EarthSea, 1968

There's so much about darkness and light in her work, often informed by the Tao Te Ching, which she translated in 2019. Probably my all time favorite quote below, Le Guin captures the power of the mind and imagination to shift our collective reality:

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.”

Excerpt from Ursula K Le Guin's speech at National Book Awards

About the frame

These images are from the wood shop of Kelly Best, an incredibly talented artist and woodworker who is also based in Berkeley, California.

He created a platform style frame for this painting made out of unfinished redwood. Kelly explains how this style of wood work, smoothly sanded, without finishing oil or varnish, was seen more commonly in the 1960s and 70s. It’s a warm, chalky brown, the same color that glows through the earth tones of the underpainting. 

I came to him with a question. Usually I default to a floating frame, flush with the face of the painting or no frame at all. Personally, I love seeing the sides of a great painting, showing all the evidence of the surface built up over time, the finger prints of the artist, the paint marks and smudges and even the dirt from moving around in the world. But not everyone loves this.

Is there a way to show at least a little bit of the sides of the painting? This piece has many paintings underneath it, the layers of paint built up over years in the studio. Every layer has been sanded carefully, especially the face where it meets the sides, until it has the richness of a sort of dense chocolate cake, the kind with a satiny black shell (you know what I mean?) where meets the raw canvas on the side of the piece. I don’t want to lose this.

In response he said, “look, I’ll make the back variable so you or whoever else can adjust it to reveal as much or as little as you like.“ So this piece is an experiment in that sense. I’m so happy about the way it turned out.

Looking forward to a bright 2025

Looking back at this past year, there are a few new practices that I like and will be taking with me into 2025. Applying to grants, fellowships and (short) residencies became a routine part of my art practice. I embraced getting rejection letters instead of feeling the sting of failure. Stephen King would famously pin his rejections to his wall as a sort of badge of honor.

I want to mention the Rome prize and the Guggenheim Fellowship. Both of them essentially ask, what would you do for a year if you could do anything? Of course it should be in your ‘zone of genius’, not exactly anything, but still, it’s sort of daunting. Everybody I’ve asked responds with an initial terror- filled glance, then shrugs with, ‘um, I have no idea what I’d do if I had a year to do whatever I wanted’. Too much freedom suddenly turns into more of a free fall.

I love the exercise of applying to these kind of ambitious things because at the very least, I get crystal clear about what I want. The essay I wrote for the Guggenheim fellowship and the Rome Price were researched. I re-wrote each draft a dozen times, waking up in the middle of the night to add ideas, made ruthless cuts. I referenced my favorite writers and thinkers, which was fun. John Berger, Julia Kristeva and Lauren Elkin’s ideas all made it in. What a pleasure to be in such good company.

CYCLES AND CARROTS

Looking back even farther, for some reason 2014 was a big year for me. I collaborated with a lot of talented folks and made a lot of work. I was in The Possible show at the Berkeley Art Museum for three months and had a solo show of sculpture at Øgaard gallery and self published a large folio style book to support the show that the brilliant Erik Heywood kindly edited.

Suddenly I’m realize I’m wishing for these same things all over again. The carrot I’m chasing is essentially the same as ten years ago, twenty years ago. It’s so cyclical. I want to work consistently toward a solo show with a supporting book. How have I changed over ten years since this fated, busy year of 2014, after getting married, moving to the east coast and back, having a child and surviving a global pandemic? How has my work changed? I’m back to painting again after a long stint as a ceramist.

Some things don’t really change. I’m wearing the same style of men’s charcoal grey cashmere sweaters I’ve worn since I was twenty. I’ve probably bought dozens of them over the years at goodwill or wherever. I’m a painter and I’m happiest when I make art every day. This is punctuated by periods of doubt and being unsure about my path. But why not just embrace all this and reach for the stars? Why wish to change a tiger’s stripes?

Awaiting that spring edition of the New York times, when all the fellow’s names are mentioned. In all likelihood, it won’t be me, but it’s possible. And that’s exciting.

Image of the book I made for the Ogaard show in 2014

The evolution of a skeleton painting

This painting has come a long way. I started it in the brightest days of summer and I had a lot of thoughts swirling around. I had an idea of a specter, breezing through an airy room, unnoticed to us mere mortals. Then time passed and although the painting was finished and even framed, i took it back into the studio and had to make it more somehow more grounded, real, darker. More frightening but also more childlike. This phantom wanted a seat at the table and wanted all his friends to be there too. Suddenly it was a dinner party, in the darkest days of winter.

Let’s talk about everybody at this dinner party. We have the skeleton, guest of honor or maybe the host, swan friend, black witch moth, banana slug (one of my favorite things to paint lately) the captive unicorn, a snail and a mourning dove.

in progress

Art living in a space we also live in

I was looking at Cindy Sherman’s art collection the other day and at first blush, it reads to me as sort of wacky (I’m looking specifically at the UFO in flames, crashed on a cow pasture painting, placed over the bed. It’s hilarious and sort of scary and electric but I wouldn’t choose it for the place where I sleep…my dreams!) I spent more time with her collection in the space and realized- it’s incredible. It’s a perfect, refined, full reflection of her taste as an artist. It’s awesome, in the best sense of the word. And she gets to live with all this imagery and people and ideas every day. She gets to have dreams about crashed UFOs and whatever else she pleases.

Here’s what I’m thinking about: how art as lives in a beautifully designed space. It makes a space, gives it a soul, is a reflection of the soul of the person who lives there. This is why art is essential.

Images from the book Billy Cotton Interior & Design work