The Hammock Papers: Washing.

10 January 2018

Washing.

Whitefish Review's Brian Schott interviews Russell Chatham and Rob Stern ...

Rob Stern: Mood is everything. Sometimes it’s the only thing.

Russell Chatham: If you could translate one medium to another medium i.e. visceral response to colors and shapes and forms to words, it’s like poetry. It’s like trying to translate poetry to prose. You can’t do it because it can only exist in its natural form. So a painting at its very best trans- mits its message in a nonverbal way, that you can’t really discuss it. You can’t explain it in words. And scholars are constantly trying to explain paintings in words and you can’t really. I mean you can try. It doesn’t hurt anything. You can go ahead — hey, give it your best shot.

Brian Schott: Right.

RC: But that’s not going to be it.

RS: Sometimes the more you try to explain a painting, just the stu- pider you look. It’s like, “Oh, it’s such a vision of strength!” It’s like a violin solo or something. You just close your eyes and melt into it and you can’t explain it.

RC: Exactly. It’s like somebody asked me the other day. They said that musicians or composers have over the centuries talked about certain melodic constructs being seen in their mind as if it was in color. And I listen to classical music relentlessly, compulsively, and they asked me if I saw the music in color and I said, “No, I don’t.” Right or wrong, I don’t care. That’s not how I listen to music. I respond because I don’t understand music. I tried to study music theory and piano and I couldn’t really understand. It’s too complicated. It’s mathematics. It’s just too complicated. I respond to it out of an emotional basis. So certain pieces of music evoke certain emotional responses and that’s as far as I can get.

RS: When you’re composing something, at least for me, I never say I want this to look a certain way.

RC: No, I never do either.

RS: I always say I want this to feel a certain way. I want it to make me feel a certain way.

RC: I think if you do that — if I’m listening to some piece of music — I tend to like a great number of great composers — I feel like the music is washing over me and I’m just crazed at how beautiful it is.

RS: Yes, you can’t sit there and go, “Oh, I really like how that trumpet over there goes high and the guitar goes over here like this.” You are completely immune to the process.

RC: It’s like this. I think to myself, if I can make somebody feel this painting the way I am now feeling about this piece of music, I’ll be happy.

RS: Right, right.

RC: Certainly like Mozart — what was it Benny Goodman played? Clarinet concerto. It’s like the purity of the notes. I am thinking to myself, I can even listen to this ten times in one day and never get tired of it and I’ll cry every fucking time that song plays.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL