Wintershed

A buck drops its antlers every winter.
Collected from the forest floor and now in my studio:

Wintershed twitter.com/buckhouse/stat…

— James Buckhouse (@buckhouse) December 31, 2011

Timing calculus

Moments before this.

How to hold a rope

Thinking of the initial vibration that first made polyphonic sound... and the overtone series. Can we imagine holding that rope and whipping it through the paces of tonal harmonics? The tonic, the octave, the dominant, the sub-dominat.

Can we imagine the first two human voices that sang together? At first they might have sung the same song. And then tried an octave apart. But then, the first polyphonic attempt—what great courage! Did the 5th come naturally? Or was there scooping and searching and tuning mid-flight?

As the tones and songs collapsed upon each other, what dissonance rubbed the right way to create some new thought for the nature of sound?

The crack of a tree limb falling in a thunderstorm, the snort of a horse sucking oxygen on a hard run, the chatter of currents carving a river bed, sound is always environmental. Art is always contextual.

Can we imagine a new art that is equal parts mathematics and experience? Can we have the courage to admit that the visual and the aural are experienced simultaneously (even if we care more for one than the other)?

Opera vs. ballet

Why do opera fans and ballet fans resist each other's art? Both seem to be an elaboration on music: an elucidation, an exaltation; and yet there is a mutual distrust among audiences. It seems out of date. Fresher would be to celebrate the genius of both forms, learning from one to inform the other. Both are theatre. Both are music embodied. Both can transform the viewer through excellence.

Both require an architecture of form and a vocabulary of norms to rub up against, to bend, to both subvert and confirm. Both are old traditions that are always contemporary. Both owe more to narrative and story than either wishes to admit. Both are complex webs of signification, looping and interlocking signs and tropes to reveal something new from the old and something familiar, loved or trusted from the new.

Both forms can shock. Both forms can bore. Both forms require a time and a place and a willing audience. Both forms unfold. Both forms exist in a moment of perpetual risk: at any moment the performance could tumble, and yet, almost always it does not. Both forms are metonymic stand-ins for life. The curtain rises, we risk, we dare, we try, we fail, we succeed, we try again and then without exception it ends. Opera and ballet both remind us to love more, try harder, and think better thoughts. What can we bring from opera to ballet, and what can we bring from ballet to opera? How can each benefit from the other?

Friends and Strangers

Friends and strangers watercolors added to JamesBuckhouse.net

All Fashion is Fiction

Serg Riva images on James Buckhouse.net

Elucidate material sensuality

I've posted a series of 20 C-prints 20"x30" of close-ups of my intaglio portfolio. The work is a deep exploration into a vocabulary of mark-making. I trained under a master print maker from Crown Point Press 15 years ago. Recently, I went back to that work to look into the rhythm, punctuation, and utterance of the mark. Teasing out close-ups that unlocked new compositions of expression, rhythm, decision-making and hope. The work parallels my recent explorations into language, narrative, and the physics of resonance, but is rendered in a direct way: explicit, direct, physical marks to elucidate material sensuality.

You can see all 20 online here:

http://jamesbuckhouse.net

Hope you enjoy.

Two of a kind

I met these two a few years ago at the Haight street fair. It was not Halloween, but they were still in costume. She wore a rubber horse mask, he dressed like Kurt Cobain.

Wash portrait

Looking at the liminal fringe between brown and blue, I made this wash portrait.

View from the ground

That same scene, as seen from the ground.

On foot

How to catch a wild horse on foot: use a strong rope, plan your angle of attack.

The mouth of the wolf

In bocca al lupo!

Recently I dreamed I hosted a TV show about contemporary opera called "In Bocca al Lupo!" where the announcer repeatedly introduced me as "the Ryan Seacrest of Opera" and every time he did, the camera would cut to a shot of Mr. Seacrest who smiled from a special seat in the front row of the studio audience. Others in the front row included the guy who posted the "@pluckbro" video to YouTube and the man who played the matchstick game in Last Year at Marienbad.

The show opened with me in a tuxedo inside of a wolf costume, embodying the old Italian saying for "break a leg" —into the mouth of the wolf.

The rest of the dream was a discussion of Ligeti, John Adams, Nico Muhly, Berio, and the future of chamber opera in the digital age. The final half hour of the show closed with a mini-opera composed for TV. I did not catch the title, but the opera made heavy use of animation. The music was gloriously obtuse while delivering the promise of tunefulness just around the corner. The meter was 7 against 3. The key (as much as there was one) was F# minor.

Group show at Walter Maciel

Size Matters
Group Show
16 July - 19 August 2011

An early watercolor portrait from my Friends and Strangers series is on view at the Walter Maciel Gallery.

map to the gallery
2642 S La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034

Rope work