“Every Monday for 12 months, The Reconstructionists will debut a hand-painted illustration and short essay highlighting a woman from fields such as art, science, and literature.” [from Storyboard] Think Anna Magdalena Bach will make an appearance? I’m fascinated by this Reconstructionists project (the title makes me think of religious movements?) and love the combo of illustration with text. Together with “The Female Gaze” exhibit I recently saw at the Pennsylvania

I hope someday I get to be included in a study on the role of music in influencing brain functions. Here I am, trying to work on a fellowship application, and I can’t string two words together until I turn on the Bartók Violin Sonatas as recorded by Christian Tetzlaff and Leif Ove Andsnes. It is apparently the only music to which I can write. Now suddenly my brain is in all-out verbal composition mode and I can produce entire paragraphs of meaningful thought. (Never mind that I’m sti

Anna Magdalena Bach was Johann Sebastian Bach’s second wife, mother of 13 of his children, the copyist of his manuscripts and herself an accomplished musician. When I became interested in using J.S. Bach’s music as the basis for a new body of work, her name repeatedly caught my eye in my background research. Then I ran across an article describing how an Australian researcher has theorized, based on forensic science and musical analysis, that Anna Magdalena may have been the composer

Took a couple of in-process shots of my latch hook rug based on Bach’s Prelude in C Major. I’m almost one-third of the way through. Talk about tedious. Good thing I’ve got Doctor Who to keep me company.

New ideas, new direction… Intersections of musical notation, craft process and concept-based art. Music theory meets color theory. I’m starting with a latch-hook rug of Bach’s Prelude in C Major from the Well-Tempered Clavier Book I. My idea is to obsessively replicate the color pattern of the Prelude in as many tactile, tangible media as I can think of. More on the concept to come later when I have a better sense of what the heck I’m doing and whether I can actually stom

Here’s another visualization of J.S. Bach: the first Prelude and Fugue to the Well-Tempered Clavier. The Prelude is playing a dominant role in the new artwork I’m brainstorming, so it’s fascinating to see how someone else envisioned it.

I’ve been experimenting with visualizations of J.S. Bach’s music and this video caught my eye:

When a system constantly replicates even a simple set of variables, the result quickly becomes organic, seemingly uncontained. By rolling dice to move around the color wheel using mathematical probabilities, Murken dissolves the familiar spectrum into variegated columns of haphazard hues. Towering chroma without regard to art-school theory nonetheless impose beauty on the gallery-white walls. There are the beginnings of excess, of sheer visceral reaction to brilliant abstraction. Phonebooks as t