Week 1: First Songs

Watercolor, charcoal, and salt on paper. 9" x 18".

For this first project, Tony suggested that I and the others in the class make works that deal with our first experiences hearing music in person--music sung or played for us by a living person using only vocal cords and instruments to make the sounds.

My parents each have some sort of family history on the land--my Mom spent part of her childhood outside Atlanta, and her Dad (my Granpappy) first arrived there from a small town in the country, a place called Villa Rica, Georgia. My own Dad grew up in the Hudson Valley of New York, not far from Poughkeepsie, in the town of Freedom Plains.

Maybe the first song I remember my parents singing to me when I was young is one that I've come to call "Mr. Moon." Searching for more information about it online, I found mention of a song with nearly identical lyrics called "Mr. Sun." I don't remember whether it was my Mom or Dad that first sang "Mr. Moon" to me; I think I recall both of them singing it at different points in time. As I remember it, the song's lyrics go like this:

Mr. Moon, Moon, bright and silvery Moon/
Hiding behind that tree/
Mr. Moon, Moon, bright and silvery Moon/
Won't you please shine down on me?

I'm gonna shoot that possum with my ol' shot-gun/
Shoot that possum 'fore he starts to run/
Oh Mr. Moon, Moon, bright and silvery Moon/
Won't you please shine down on me?

When I think of that song, I think first and foremost of the possum, which in my imagination is a scurrying creature that can be found running from hiding place to hiding place under a moonlit sky. In the paintings that I made this past week, though, I didn't care as much about the possum. I wanted to convey both the incredible brightness of a moonlight night in the country--like the ones I experienced driving as a teenager along the farm fields that surround Lansing, Michigan--and the blackness of the shade that a tree in one of those farm fields can create. I'm not sure what the salt was about. I suppose it had just been a while since I'd worked with salt and watercolor. I'll leave it to you, the viewer, to speculate on what the little whitish flecks that those salt grains left in the paintings are about.

In hindsight, I think these paintings were directed at my memories of summer nights in the Midwest, which are beautiful and hot and sometimes a bit spooky. Living in California, I don't get the opportunity to experience those kinds of nights any more, but the memories of them are strong inside me and, hopefully, they've come through in the work.