Artist Statement
In the early 80s I drew 36 thumbnail sketches of scenes from the traditional ballads in my repertoire. The set of sketches, latter made into a little book of sepia ink drawings, were followed by small paintings, more drawings, and ceramics that utilized the ballad images as source material. Around the same time I made recordings of some of the ballads, their tunes somewhat altered from the traditional sources, with harmonization, and rhythms of my own devising.
The ballads had sparked my imagination in childhood. While listening to the stories they tell, with mood and atmosphere vividly evoked by music and lyric images, I imagined the events of the story as scenes with characters, in effect staging them as a play I could watch with my eyes closed. As I began to sing the ballads myself, this visualization deepened, through repetition, into an articulated virtual otherworld. Each "staging" of the imagined ballad added detail and clarity to the story, as the motivations of the ballad characters were informed by personal experience. As I became conscious of this process, the ballad project began to take form.
In 1990, just after the premiere performances of The Stone Man, and just as I was beginning to conceptualize The Secret Commonwealth cycle of dance operas, I deluded myself into thinking I could also begin work on a set of 12 large ballad paintings. The object model for these paintings was based on the erotic and mythological images produced by European easel painters before the 20th century. I began with "Reynardine," followed by "Barbara Ellen" and "True Thomas." Some aspects of those trial efforts were encouraging, but I had seriously underestimated the amount of time and materials such large paintings require.When it began to look like utter financial ruin, I moved the three canvases to my storage studio and turned my attention to The Secret Commonwealth, for the next 13 years, which was challenging enough in its own way. The third part of The Secret Commonwealth, "Love & Time," is an expanded version of "True Thomas" and has within it an "entertainment" of ballads, a compressed version of "Ballads of the Barefoot Mind."
But luckily for me my friend Robb was poking around in my old studio and found the first three ballad paintings. He wisely advised me to continue work on the set, an idea which, (because one must be cautious about artistic advice), I pretended was absurd. But we did move one of the paintings into my work space, where it remained until Steve Wilson happened to visit my studio. After he and Laura Lee Brown, his wife and art collecting partner, saw the first three paintings they commissioned me to complete the set.
Work on the paintings resumed in 2003 and continued through to the spring of 2006.
My artistic interests are situated at the intersection of visual, musical and storytelling arts. Happily, the Ballads of the Barefoot Mind project has allowed me to combine all three.