Imbolc Transit (poem)

Imbolc:
Transit
Arrival;

( Always
arrival and
further
transit)



Soft gray light on cold and
wintry morning

( Did I dream of Brigid last night?
that fiery arrow of a young goddess,
her energy and passion
sharp, to pierce dark clouds with longing?)


The strong-shadowed trees
cross like paths and
map contours alongside
the steep-sided,
snow-bearing
February hillside

Eastering sun
stirs sap
somewhere,
I do believe--

Yes--

A deep and silent

Somewhere.



-kmb

Winter Resonance

WINTER RESONANCE- video paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown

Making paintings is, for me, a form of active meditation. This winter, finding my mornings devoted to the second draft of a new novel and the afternoon painting light gone by the time I get home from work, I have arrived by accident at a method to keep to my visual art meditations nonetheless.
One afternoon I got the urge to take some flip camera video of snowfall through a curtained window. After a while, I suddenly borrowed an inspiration from film maker Andrei Tarkovsky and began moving the curtain at various speeds while I shot. The video sequence itself was not all that compelling—but I found that isolating still frames revealed some interesting abstractions and motion-induced visual artifacts. So I began choosing frames that, as compositions, captured my interest, then I made simple adjustments in saturation and contrast—until the images began to resonate for me.
In subsequent days I’ve been shooting patterns of light on walls, floors, windows, snow, and trees, with the camera moving, and the light patterns moving also, at some point each day taking time to choose a frame and make an image.
I do miss the smell of paint and the feel of the brush on canvas or paper; but I’ll get back to them before long, when the light gets stronger. Meanwhile I’m enjoying these visual surprises and I am planning on re-animating them, with music to accompany, before winter is over.
-kmb

Ending 2010; 2011 Horizons

(Mountains, Lake: Dusk- painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, acrylic on canvas)

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As I write this, a late December storm is swirling snow hard into dark pines and spruces, making a world of whites and grays in lines and layers.

The first thing I want to do here is offer my gratitude for all who have supported and shared in my explorations, expressions, and meditations in word, sound, and image!

2010 was a sometimes-challenging year for me; but it was also a year of deep engagement with my inner and outer worlds; of expansion and discovery. As ripple and result, I felt a turning point--a hinged door swinging open-- in late summer.
I had taken to visiting daily a certain place on and in the cold, clear Dog River, letting the peace and power of stone, sand, water, sky cover and fill me. One day I spent hours skimming the same blue shard of slate, recovering it from the river-bottom from under clear water, skimming it across surface tension again, finding it...and sometime during all this, in one rushing moment, I felt the truth of my situation and words came to me: "stepping into the river of gratitude." That river is cold with snow and ice now, all these months later, but the moment still moves, warm in my heart.

Thus it's probably somewhat fitting that my main work in music and art during 2010 would flow together in this video:




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As for the 2011 horizon, it seems that there might be a bevy of books approaching.
In the spring I plan to release a mystery novel called HIGHWAY IN THE BLOOD. It's set in Vermont in the 1970s, and features a strong component of vintage country music and steel guitar lore. I'm planning a book launch and reading with live performance on steel guitar and dobro. And in the fall, look for the third book in the Liam Dutra New England mystery series.
There's also a novel in manuscript--I'll be digging into further drafts with the new year. Right now I can barely remember anything about it, which is exactly where I want to be when I return my attention.
I hope you'll be around for some of this-- and, of course, whatever else might come along...

-kmb

Gray Day, But Something on the Horizon...

NOVEMBER PASSAGE; HORIZON MEDITATION 2-- Paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown, acrylic on canvas, November 23, 2010

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Today the monochromatic November sky inspired me to work mostly with the last of a tube of Payne's gray. As I worked on the first painting, NOVEMBER PASSAGE, I somehow began to think of Bartok. So I listened to the Viola Concerto while I made both pieces. In the second movement-- the "Adagio Religioso" --I always hear light breaking through, and that's what I wanted to paint.

-KMB

Day's Edge, Water's Edge

QUIET WATERS 8, QUIET WATERS 7- Paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown,

acrylic on canvas, October 2010

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Contemplative energies at two edges of the same day in the same place.

Places Water Seeks

Lake Light, September Morning- painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, 2010
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Places Water Seeks

I

River and sky exchange
Intersticial gleamings and
striations of low-toned
light in September:

gray
to steel to
silver to
bronze



II

I am walking in the
shallows and
stalking a heron;
the heron is
stalking the shallows,
watching the water;

The morning is mostly bedraggled
but also
burnished



III

It’s like this at the places where water seeks
the level of flowing, fulfilling--

Such that EVERYTHING
else becomes the guide to its own

horizon


At the Dog River, it’s the
smoke-blue of White Rock Mountain
quiet and looming beyond the bend

At Lake Champlain, it’s those
strong, jagged ranges ringed hard all around


At Good Harbor, the Atlantic at Cape Ann,
it’s Dogtown’s high granite, yes--
but also the lucent gleamings,
twinned and soft-hazed, of
The towers of the Church of
Our Lady of Good
Voyage.

I am so often looking
up and over, into and
beyond the limit…

It is, after all,
water itself
that rises

To push at, then hold.
the entire sky
and more.


- Kevin Macneil Brown

Seeking Shadows, Holding Light: Music for the Fall Equinox

Sept. 23, 2010

I step outside with coffee mug in hand at 5:32. Clouds riding low on morning horizon, but stars and Jupiter in clear sky above, and a bright satellite moving across from NW to SE. Cricket song hazes the warm air. There’s a band of light, rising pale and high, directly across from where the sun will soon appear.
Coffee half gone at 5:50. I go inside, sit down with my steel guitar, and begin to play, tuning my heart and thoughts toward autumn’s arrival. The music rises, its simple and somewhat stark harmonic motion conjuring for me the image of a web of slow, wide ripples—and also, somehow, the ghosts of British Renaissance church music living on in American mountain ballads.
I listen and play while the morning light arrives on the first full day of fall.

-kmb

Morning Shore, September Light

North Shore Passage- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor and gouache on paper, 2010

August Ripening

Horizon Meditation

HORIZON MEDITATION 1- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, 2010)


trust the
symmetry until
something deeper
and more true
is revealed:

the pulsing shapes and
colors can-
not be defined
or explained but,
yes!
they are real.

vessels, structures,
openings, arrivals,
chroma, hues;
saturations of perception.

and all with breath
as solid as any
ancient stone,

vibrating,
infinitely
becoming.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

Celebrating the Lush Light of Summer

Toward the Harbor, Morning
Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, 2010

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This is an edited version of a performance at Bethany Church, in Montpelier, Vermont.
LISTENING TO LIGHT was presented from noon to one on June 21, 2010, as contemplative music in honor of the summer solstice and the longest day of the year.
Kevin Macneil Brown- lap steel guitar, guitar, composition, recording and mix.

Upcoming Event: Listening To Light

LISTENING TO LIGHT

by Kevin Macneil Brown

Monday June 21, Noon to One

Bethany Church Working Chapel

Montpelier, Vermont

Free and open to the public

A live performance , in a sacred, meditative space , of contemplative music to honor the longest days of the year. Please come by to listen, contemplate, walk the labyrynth; Stay for a moment or an hour. Noon to One; free and open to the public.


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Beginning with the Winter Solstice last year, I've had the honor of presenting contemplative multi-media events to mark the solar calendar, graciously hosted by Bethany Church in Montpelier, Vermont. It's long been a dream of mine to present my more meditative and ambient music in a sacred space; honoring the intent at the heart of this music: to share in sound a deep connection to nature, spirit, and the ineffable power of creative energy.

(I've also, variously, offered visual art and poetry to accompany the music. )

The idea I have for these events is that they unfold without any beginning or end other than their actual duration-- that is, people can come and go as they please, finding and taking as much or little as they need. I have also found that the contemplative attention that people bring, whether listening, meditating, praying, writing, drawing, walking the labyrynth--has a profound effect on the music--- this I find to be wonderful; surprising, exciting.

My thanks go to all who share this adventure with me. Much gratitude also goes to Mark Pitton, for the enthusiasm and commitment he has brought to this process!

-kmb

In Fathoms: Dreams and Soundings

East Gloucester Liminal- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic on canvas, 2009

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Avoiding the wreck
that lay at 30 fathoms
we nonetheless stirred
something from the bottom.

Stranger and
darker than any old bones--
we could not say
what it was.

But between blue basin
and silver shoal water
our captain could
thread the needle;

Through fog now, to Brown’s Bank,
where we arrived by morning,
in time to set out new lines.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

At Dawn

Morning Beach

Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, 2010

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Rising
{sun}

pillar of
diffuse light
through

clouds, becoming
the point of
being
every

reach of
now.


-Kevin Macneil Brown

Good Harbor Liminal

LIMINAL, GOOD HARBOR BEACH--Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,

watercolor on paper, 2010)







... Across a tide,



racing to greet a shoreline,



welcome as first light.





-kmb



from NORTH COAST DREAMING:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/luminist-diary-north-coast-dreaming/2499200

Every Journey Has a Soul

EVERY JOURNEY HAS A SOUL- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic and maps on canvas board, 2007)



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So grateful for a world
like this,

where, at 4:30 A.M., I can be
pulled from deep sleep by

the song of a bird
I’ve never heard before.


A stepwise song, with rising and
falling intervals like the summits of
soft and wooded hills;

a green and hollow April timbre,
round with yesterday’s rain,
and clean with today’s shimmer
of sun in the moving river.


So grateful for the way all this pulls me awake
and right into the journey,


this sound that leads the way...


-Kevin Macneil Brown

Good Harbor, Morning

GOOD HARBOR, MORNING- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,

acrylic on canvas, 2010)

.... seaweed, kelp, and keen of gulls
where the liminal begins (can liminal have a beginning?)
and bells ride the wind and tide.
I might find, in any sky, that the light makes real the world...

-kmb

From LUMINIST DIARY:

http://www.lulu.com/content/2152993#detailsSection

Atmospheric Skip and AM Country Music Dreams

As I finish up recording and mixing THREE MILE BRIDGE-- an EP, I guess, not quite an album-- of my most recent country songs, I realize that I've never let go of an obsessive memory from my teenage years. It's that of late night/early morning radio, coming up on WWVA from Wheeling, West Virginia in the 1970s.
On Saturday nights I'd stay up all night, transistor radio under the pillow, to listen up close-- as close as I could, anyway, through all the static, the distance and drift. Live music with steel guitars and fiddles; singers, some well-known, others obscure; Coffee-and twang-fueled truck driving songs from the Jamboree.
I liked the voices, the stories; the sense of something timeless reaching through those late nights and early mornings; across the plains, up the Blue Ridge Mountains, or from who-knows-where; sounding in the gray-blue pre-dawn of my New Hampshire mountain home.
I can't let go of the yearning and joy those sounds brought to life inside me. So I keep coming back to my own imagination of them; in my own way. Most of these new songs are about places close to home here in Central Vermont.

Upcoming Event: Finding Light

(Spring Sky From Shoreline- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, 2009)

Finding Light: Music, Word, and Image for Equinox Arrival
A meditative and contemplative celebration of Spring's arrival, with live ambient music, poetry, and images by Kevin Macneil Brown.

Saturday, March 20

Noon to One O' Clock

Bethany Church Working Chapel

Montpelier, Vermont

Free and open to the Public

After Snow, Looking North

AFTER SNOW, LOOKING NORTH

Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, acrylic on canvas, 2010)