Week 3: You Are My Sunshine

Pencil, gesso, and collage on paper. 9" x 9".

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine/
You make me happy when skies are grey/
You'll never know dear, how much I love you/
Please don't take my sunshine away.

This singalong that's played out at millions of church camp campfires, this lullaby that's been sung to untold numbers of small American children, has a darkness lurking under its surface. Like America itself, the song is about love and joy, but simultaneously also about fear and obsession.

The song writer, Jimmie Davis, speaks of having a dream in which he holds his beloved, only to wake up alone, surprised not to find her there next to him, and sprinkles the remainder of the song with suggestions of the despair that the loss of this person has brought about for him:

You told me once dear, you really loved me/
And no one else could come between/
But now you've left me and you love another/
And you have shattered all my dreams!

I'll always love you and make you happy/
If you will only say the same/
But if you leave me to love another/
You'll regret it all some day.

For this week, Tony emphasized that we should connect our personal streams of thought and feeling with the cultural. Whereas my post last week was pretty personal, this time I felt the need to drill into a reading of the song that is about our broader situation here in the United States.

The photo mounted on the drawing that I made this week was taken in the mid-20th century here at UC Berkeley. I found it on a poster hanging in the architecture building, which was advertising an event being hosted here in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the invention of the atomic bomb. The men in the photo are nuclear physicists who are manipulating some sort of control panel. When I found the photo, I was taken with these guys' wonderful grins, particularly that of the guy on the right. 

With the benefit of hindsight, reasonable people living today can agree that discoveries in nuclear physics have helped bring about immense suffering. Depending on when this photo was taken, these men may or may not have understood the enormity of what they were doing. Whatever they knew, this photo suggests that they got some serious boyish delight out of their control panel. It was their sunshine.

Week 2: Down in the Valley

Basswood, paper, and oil crayon on paper. 9" x 9".

"Down in the Valley" is a song about love, and a song about imprisonment. If you've never heard the song and you're reading this now, you might be thinking that a song which is about both of these things at once is bound to be a pretty blue tune. 

As chance would have it, the first time I heard a rendition of "Down in the Valley" was just a few weeks ago. It was Otis Redding singing it, and hearing it that night, I figured the song was about a party at a juke joint in a hot part of the country--to me, it just has that kind of funky, sweaty vibe to it, and I don't think there's anything sad or morose about it.

When I heard the much older Darby & Tarleton version, and finally read through the lyrics, I still didn't feel like I was listening to a funeral march, but for the first time I noticed the longing that's expressed in the lyrics:

Roses love sunshine/
violets love dew/
angels in Heaven/
know I love you.

Write me a letter/
send it by mail/
send it in care of/
Birmingham Jail.

I suppose some songs have a way of concealing the content of their lyrics through the feelings that their melodies, harmonies, and rhythms give. I've noticed this about a lot of folk songs in particular. This week, I think I was interested in making work that also places distance between its inner meaning (personal to me, in this case) and the physical form that it takes.

Without revealing too much, I'll say that I had in mind a particular person when I was making this piece. At times I have felt close to that person, and at others I've felt separated by large forces (distance, let's say) that are hard for any individual to control. At its core, my relationship with this person is a joyous thing, but like the men and women who have sung "Down in the Valley" over the years, I've found that the world can sometimes render that joy inaccessible. 

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.