A couple of difficult days, working non-stop, exhaustingly so in these difficult times. A times I feel like Vermeer after the Year of Disaster, thinking of death and legacy, but no! I'm full of positive energy and ideas, and more ability than ever. Everything I've done seems poor and inferior compared to what I can achieve now, so I must make as much as I can while I can, but it must be the best I can muster, too. Life feels short, desperate. Five years said Bowie. I feel I have two.
I'm thinking of finally making the Dadd Cabinet II with oak and expensive materials, and yesterday completed the frame for the Oncology painting. I also designed lots of new MODX instruments for future Fall in Green shows, which I'm sure will sound better than ever. We must begin to perform live again. I need a residency in some performance venue to stage regular ArtSwarm-like events! The world needs this!
Today I rehearsed some of the music for the Market Hall event on the 19th, and started to compose the music for Stefano Santachiara's Lou Salome project. This is the very early stage, improvising by mood. How useful it is to have the words. I can match the mood and the flow of these. I'm trying to use a general theme of D-minor and a couple of alternating notes. In the night, at 2am, racked with another night of awful stomach agonies I started to write and play an opening theme, a waltz.
Today I've sketched out 7 of the 10 needed works, all on piano, but these will need harmonising, much refining and unifying across the whole project. Each feels like a bigger work than ever before. Cycles and The Anatomy of Emotions were just six tunes each, but now I have 12, and unlike the Apocalypse of Clowns pieces, these must have a unity of form. Adding unity of form to 12 tracks, like an album, has been a long-term quest of mine.
I can't afford the time for an unpaid project and must rush and use my wits and genius, but all of my projects are probably unpaid, until they become a smash-hit, and all art deserves to be made in the best way I can manage. We may tour this show internationally one day, one distant day.
Onwards we charge.
