Another Shore Remembered

Evening, Kennebec River, June.
Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, May 2011

-----------------------------------------

Lately, I've been visited by sudden, strong memories of certain times and places--particular shorescapes I've experienced. After these memories come upon me, I spend time--over the course of a few days, usually-- refining the images within my mind. Once they are clear to the recall, I begin to paint...
-kmb

Book Launch: HIGHWAY IN THE BLOOD

www.highwayintheblood.wordpress.com

this one morning...

...this one morning is the reason i came to this place... (York Beach, Maine)
Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, May 2011

Good Harbor, Remembered May Morning

Good Harbor-- Remembered May Morning
Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, 2011

There are certain places I return to by conjuring inside myself: real-world places that have made a deep imprint of color, mood, energy, motion; stillness, space, distance; geologic shape and form, inner and outer engagement. By contemplation and imagination I put myself in these places and create a vivid and refreshing sanctuary; a connection and confluence with something I call depth of place.
Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester, Massachusetts is one of those places. I return again and again, in memories, meditations, dreams. This painting, made in hazy May sunlight, brings me back to a certain remembered spring morning at Good Harbor: waking up in a sleeping bag in the dunes; watching morning arriving and changing over the water--bringing light from above and shadows from below.
-kmb

Woodland Passage, April Morning

In depth of dark
woods, the sudden slant of
April’s empty light.

Near hard noon meridian
over softness of moss—viridian
underfoot—I stop,
wanting some stillness

and stand
beside a massive quartzite boulder
left here a long time,
almost motionless, glacial
erratic ( but only to limited perceptions.)

I’m not sure
what I can bring
to all this:

Yes, the gift of respiration;
The manifold graces
of being present—

These thoughts cross
inner oceans and
eons in an instant

and at once I find
that I want
to be one who

will stand at the marge of
this season with prayers and passion

seeking the true glide
of wisdom, imagination;

will watch open-hearted for
the fields’ first greening,

the hazing-over of
the hot, coppered sun,

and on the horizon
distant, small, strong,
the broadwings’ lifting arrival.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

Mid-March, at the eastern heart of this morning like no other...

Mid-March: at the eastern heart of this
morning like no other,

The perfect pyramid of Spruce Mountain
rises weightless washed blue.

Above and beyond, arrives
a fresh and fearless sky,

Harder blue,
pulsed–through with the hue
of future roses—

Blooms that, in a softer season,
will be here,

Warm and glistening,
fully-fleshed,

In the all-pervasive sunlight
that seeks itself even in shadows.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

winter resonance and the ineffable freedom of captured light

As I worked through the winter on the video paintings in the WINTER RESONANCE series, it became clear to me that I had found the right images to accompany my 2007 composition THE INEFFABLE FREEDOM OF CAPTURED LIGHT.
I had made that long ambient/ textural piece of music over the course of that winter, using steel guitars, an electric table organ from a church yard sale, glass bowls tuned with water, a portable suitcase metallaphone, a Lexicon jam man, and quite a lot of analog and digital processing. The purpose of the composition was to convey in sound my responses to color, light, and shadow in the winter landscape. I painted in acrylics on canvas while I listened back to various mixes and versions during that period --there is even a six-channel surround version intended for a multi-media installation. But ultimately I found that the resulting visual art was, for the most part, too representational-- mountains and skyscapes-- to accompany the music directly.
But these recent video paintings-- really, they are manipulated images of winter light itself in motion--seemed to be calling back to that music. Thus, the video above,which brings them together.
I find myself ready now to turn away from winter contemplations. Though I know that there is plenty of winter left here in Vermont, I can see--and feel-- that the light has begun to change to that of another season.
-kmb

a complete recording of THE INEFFABLE FREEDOM OF CAPTURED LIGHT is available for listening or download here:

snow and steel

Lap steel guitar improv on a snowy afternoon in February.
(Theme and structures from my composition, "Seeking Shadows, Holding Light.")
-kmb

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)

-----------------------------------------------------

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:




-------------------------------------------------------------

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

---------------------------------------

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

--------------------------------------------------------------

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
--------------------------------------------------------

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

------------------------------------------------------------------





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.


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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