Seven Randomly Chosen Sunrises

Sandpiper Summer

 Late summer now, and it seems that each of my running journeys makes its way to a shore: hard-packed mud or pebbled bar along the Winooski River; sandy urban beaches along Lake Champlain at Burlington. And in these places I keep meeting up with the sandpiper—that fleet, long-legged shorebird with plumage the pale, summer-washed gray and sandy dun of distant ocean beaches, that pealing ripple of song as the bird runs, feet wet, wings lifted up and held back, along the light-silvered shore.

 

 I’ve come to feel a connection with the sandpiper this summer. I, too, have been solitary and shore-exploring, drawn to liminal places: meetings of water, land, moving light.

And as the summer reaches fullness and ripening, I feel the sense of something finished, of movement on— no, toward— a different horizon.

 

  The time alone has been time well-spent—long runs for meditation, contemplation, motion, memory. This has fed the work I’ve made: the long sound art composition THE HARBOR AT DAWN, the series of Lake Champlain watercolor paintings that began with sketches made beginning last summer and that I finished this week. I feel myself carrying a sense of completion; of deep, deep feelings recognized, engaged with, and acted upon-- with focus and discipline; with patience, effort, and love.

 Also, all that time for reading. Just enough band practices, gigs, shifts at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library, and dinners with Robin to keep me from total isolation. I am grateful to have gone deep this summer. I have come out different.

 There is still a sense of uncertainty about major things ahead—domicile in particular. But the school year begins anew in less than two weeks, and I look forward to the intensity of middle school energy. There are lots of gigs on the near horizon, and singing and playing steel guitar with the great musicians I have the privilege to work with is an utter joy. And my creative decks are cleared for beginning draft three of Dutra mystery novel number 4, with first-readers’ notes compiled and partially contemplated—ready to roll sometime in the fall.

  Back now, to that late-summer sandpiper, running on hard-packed sand alongside blue-green water. The breaking white of small waves;  a hazed August sky above.  A ringing call rises, sounding above the white noise of those waves. The shorebird runs, wings swept back, held high, now lifting, lifting--lifted…

  

 Journal entry and watercolor sketch by KMB, August 2013.

Ask the Morning

ASK THE MORNING, 1, 2, and 3 
Paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown watercolor on paper, Summer 2013.

The idea behind the ASK THE MORNING series is simple: Drink some coffee, do some morning reading and contemplation. Gather paint, paper, water, brushes. Go outside and begin painting, going along with whatever wants to arrive.- KMB

Eastern Sky, 5:45 AM, 7/21/13

   Eastern Sky, 5:45 AM, 7/21/13.

     Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper

This morning's dawn sky was worth the early coffee. No camera, so I had to paint it!

-KMB

the harbor at dawn (new music)

In the past few days I have been putting finishing touches on a new long-form soundwork composition entitled the harbor at dawn.
This, the first section, was made with steel guitar, Lexicon Jam Man (for long delay/repeats/layering), and lap top. I was thinking of the steel guitar as a string ensemble, and I sought to find and share the quiet energies of a shoreline dawn.
The complete work will be released in August. Thanks for listening!

-KMB

Hawk on a Hill

 From all the way across the river, in the hazy green/gold  light of a June evening, a stirring sight and sound: High, high on the ridge above Hill Street, from a bare tree above lush green woods, lone sharp-shinned hawk calling, a  slow keer-keer-keer.

 That sound, I think, should not be heard so clearly across such distance; but the elevation/altitude seems to have set it loose to ring and echo.

 Now, a week later, I find that there is something in this event that has stayed with me, surfacing in my deepest meditations, my contemplations of all that is possible.

     -Journal entry and watercolor sketch by kmb, June 2013.

rust/rose/violet- music and watercolor sketch

                    A soundscape/color-field piece for  steel guitar, looping device, and laptop. As with last summer's VIRIDIAN WAVES, the idea was to create a meditation on color/light rendered in sound.The accompanying watercolor sketch was made while I listened to the final mix. -KMB


                           

Eastern Sky, 5:40 AM, 5/19/13 (watercolor painting.)

                                                   Eastern Sky, 5:40  AM, 5/19/13 
                                  painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper.

 Tired from a week busy with music and more, I almost slept in this Sunday morning. But birdsong and a glimpse of the sky pulled me out of bed to paint.  Even before the coffee was ready I was outside in the cool morning, paint, brushes, water, and paper ready. I worked very quickly, mixing from a three-color palette-- paint was flying everywhere. When I was finished, the coffee was ready.
                                                                                            -KMB

from LIGHTFALL: POEMS

Bluets below

Broadwings above

The journey flowing

southeast with wind in spruce

and coltsfoot open

mud-flecked gold

my prayer flag.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

from LIGHTFALL: POEMS:

http://www.amazon.com/Lightfall-poems-Kevin-Macneil-Brown/dp/1483981436/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366542286&sr=8-1&keywords=LIGHTFALL+POEMS

Mountains, Sky, Water; Early Spring.

                
Mountains, Sky, Water--Early Spring-   Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
                   watercolor on paper, 2013.

Here is my first painting for this spring. My thoughts and energies have been spending a lot of time in the season's marge--contrast, color, shadow, light.

Sonic Tenebrae

     
   Photograph by  kmb.

Secret Shadowed Geographies of the Triple-neck Steel Guitar.

February has been a good month for exploring the joys of playing triple-neck steel guitar, using all three necks-- in C6, A6, and E13 tunings.
The two pieces here could not be further apart in mood and style, yet were made using the same instrument,  recorded only days apart.
I have found it exciting to feel the harmonic possibilites of all three necks-- extended chords and lovely dissonances.
This first piece is an improvisation recorded in one pass, and then mixed and sound-smeared right away, to keep a unity of mood and intent:

This next is a straight-forward tribute to my favorite western swing steel player, Noel Boggs, who played with Bob Wills, Space Cooley, and others in the 40s and 50s: As you can hear, the steel guitar has many sounds and moods to express! -KMB

Black River, White Pines, Winter 1974 : Improv. for Dobro and Nashville-tuned guitar.

This early-morning improv. for Dobro and Nashville-tuned acoustic guitar was made in one take. It stirred up the memory of a certain time and place, the story and mood that was there...

And then we were awake...

 

And then we were awake in a world that was, if not new, certainly noticeably changed.

We began to notice the elegant symmetries of shapes and shadows in the motions of water, sky, and landforms. We heard all around us, as the sky filled, the music of migration, its massive vibration.

 In our hearts we began to know just how everything pulsed in waves of delight-- crest and trough, crest and trough; That every locus of change was pure opportunity:  for reflection, communion, renewal, and light.

                                                                -Kevin Macneil Brown

 

My Last Song for 2012

Started this in August, finished it today. Voice, guitar, dobro-- my last song for 2012.

-KMB

CALLS MY HEART HOMEWARD

CALLS MY HEART HOMEWARD is a gathering of the shorter contemplative compositions I created during 2012. These pieces are inspired by the textures, colors, and feelings I have found in my journeys through and into New England landscape and memory.

THE LAKE OF LIVING WATER- Book Trailer

In Autumn the Dark Shapes of Distant Mountains...

    A heart-piercing autumnal yearning and memory came from the sight, at Kents Corner beneath pewter sky, of that almost-bare maple tree with its sparse scrim of red leaves; the 1800s white house and, beyond its dooryard, the eastern uplands at the far edge of rolling hills and farmlands…
   How many ways will I need to write around and about and into this scene?  Will I ever get to the heart of the ancient homesick joy that it stirs inside me, the invisible distant horizon that holds the far-away White Mountains I once called home and then the shimmering Gulf of Maine beyond? -KMB

In October...( Music and Images)

A Book's Beginnings: thoughts on THE LAKE OF LIVING WATER.

    I remember the exact moment that THE LAKE OF LIVING WATER, my sixth novel, was born. I was running in the woods on a November afternoon in Vermont. The air was cool-- almost cold-- and smelled of evergreen and tannin. The long shadows of pines were intersticed with reaches of wan, hollow, almost–winter New England sunlight.

    As I ran, two visions appeared in my mind’s eye-- simultaneously, as I remember it. I saw the image of a man sitting alone in a room inside a cold, dark, stone tower. He was looking out a window and across the broad expanse of Lake Champlain, at the patterned skeins of late autumn sunlight that moved and shimmered on the water.

  The other image that came was that of a book… a small book, to my surprise, full of white space around blocks of text, of stories written in many voices.

   I knew that the book would tell me who the man in the tower was. And I knew that I would have to write the book.

    

     Those who have read my other books, my poems, who have seen my paintings and listened to the music I compose, will know about my fascination with the nature, history, geology, and PRESENCE of Lake Champlain—in particular the shoreline and waters  of Burlington Bay. This future book, I knew in the moment of its apparition, would have this locus itself as a main character.

      I had, that fall, just finished reading John Cowper Powys’ A GLASTONBURY ROMANCE, and that novel was still looming large --it is, after all, more than 1,000 pages long-- in my thoughts. I was captured by its sense of place, of mystery, of intersecting lives. I suppose, then, that I was being called to write my own version of a book like that. (I am still, however, a bit puzzled that it would appear to me as such a small volume…)

     

I came home from my run that November afternoon and began writing. I went on to write about 80 pages and an outline over the rest of the month and through December. (This is, so far, the only time I have ever committed to an extended stretch of writing in the afternoons—I am most definitely a morning writer!)

   I didn’t come back to the manuscript until the following spring and summer, when I finished a first draft-- also accruing, along the way, a notebook full of the results of historical research.  Over the next two years I kept writing, editing, and revising, finishing an 8^th--and final-- draft in the summer of 2012.

   

     THE LAKE OF LIVING WATER shows some traces of the mystery/detective genre, but I have no doubt that it is ultimately a strange and not easily categorized novel.  I accept this, knowing that in writing this book I have done everything I can to get to the heart of my own perceptions of --and connections to-- the mystery and power of the lake and shoreline that inspired it.

 

                                                                                   -KMB

 

  You can order  THE LAKE OF LIVING WATER  here:
               
http://www.lulu.com/shop/kevin-macneil-brown/the-lake-of-living-water/paperback/product-20419011.html

Also available in Kindle edition:
    http://www.amazon.com/The-Lake-Living-Water-ebook/dp/B009JJQZMA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1349301457&sr=8-1&keywords=the+lake+of+living+water