A LOOK INSIDE MY BRAIN

My thoughts and commentary on selections of my work.

S-SERIES
“Born to Run”, “Thunder Road”, and “Jungleland”

“Born to Run”

This is the first inter-related series of paintings I’ve ever done and were inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s performances during ten astonishing concerts in NYC in 2000. I chose Springsteen because it’s personal with him, and you can see and feel it in the energy and passion he shows for his art and his performance. In short, he CARES. I respect the quality of his lyrical writing and the excellent choices he makes when re-composing his own material. I hope to mirror his dedication and exuberance in my own work.

Obviously, there are other performance versions of these songs, and I did borrow creative energy from some of them. For example, the near frantic pace of “Born to Run” as evidenced in the “official” video of the song is stunning. Though scenes are selected from various concerts, the joy of the performance is dynamically persistent, and the exuberance and humor of the younger Springsteen is infectious and undeniable – nearly unbelievable.

“Thunder Road”

“Thunder Road” works during any performance that I’ve seen, though the acoustic version Springsteen performs with Melissa Etheridge emphasizes the unrecalcitrant poetry of the work (which the rocking version sometimes overshadows), allowing metaphors to drive the story of a man’s need to escape his life while elucidating the haunting mysteries of a woman’s past.

“Jungleland”

“Jungleland” was entirely inspired by the video of the NYC performances. Springsteen worked on this song for several years and incorporated a silky smooth sax line and solo which lifts and defines the emotional line of the song, unmatched in almost any performance I’ve seen, with the exception being the performance of “The River” in the same concert set. This was another re-imagined rock song made into a blues masterpiece. I imagine that if I painted “The River” that it would be smoother than the paintings in this series, filled with, and defined by, curved lines of richer, darker colors, and tell a much sadder story than any of these three paintings.

I am NOT thinking when I paint. I am feeling. I am expressing my feeling from within and my reaction to what is on the canvas. If I want to use words – that’s what the title is for. Or my haikus. Or my novels. Or – you get the idea. So I’m avoiding thinking, avoiding words, I just want to connect and express a flow of energy. When I enter my studio I almost never know what – or even how – I’m going to paint. I just hope it (the creative process) starts, frankly.

These three paintings in the S-Series provide the only look at how this happens and how it develops because you can compare and contrast the three works. The first, “Born to Run” is the closest example of the three which displays my attitude of “I’m walking into the studio and waking up and I’m going to paint what I feel” about the song called “Born to Run”. So, in this case, since this painting was going to be about a specific subject, specific ambitions were already percolating when I entered the studio. And you get to see, as literally as you will ever see, my thought processes turning into the energy I felt about these songs as paintings.

A few days later I painted “Thunder Road” and I was reacting to and using what I had begun in “Born to Run” – the colors, the spaces, the lights, etc. – and the order in which I employed my techniques altered slightly, and I was able to express and depict what I felt was a nuanced difference between the two performances. In an odd way, you could say that there were multiple “performances” involved in the creations of these paintings: there were the songs’ iterations which, in turn, inspired my painterly performances.

I painted “Jungleland” after a two day break. This painting began somewhat constricted by the choices I’d made in the first two paintings (such as the sax player Clarence being represented by one color and Bruce another color and the positioning of the drummer, etc.) but this work also exploded for me onto the canvas with fresh energy. I had learned from the first two, and I had become more confident and aware of what I wanted to do by the time I started the third painting. Paradoxically, the constraints had freed me from thinking again, and I was able to let the energy flow through me into the colors and shapes and spaces that I already knew had to be there. And, when I was done, I realized I had finished something quite new to me.