A quiet Christmas day with my parents. Beloved Deborah has been exposed to Covid-19 at work, so we've decided to avoid meeting for a few days. This means we can't exhange gifts and will celebrate a second Christmas at a future date. I, amazingly, know four people who are spending the holiday in hospital. Even one friend in hospital over Christmas would be a first. So, the fates welcome me into my 5th decade.
I've done some music admin and work on the painters album today and yesterday, but I'm full of doubts and feel tired, slow, and lacklustre. In art, why is the most important question, and I'm unsure why I'm doing what I'm doing - other than the universal call that it's better to do something than nothing, and that life and time is finite. Unlike some artists, I don't care about how I feel regarding inspiration; I simply do what is needed, but I do need a certain direction and plan. Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm for music is a good sign, that the steep slope of learning is levelling off, the gains fewer and fewer for the energy expended.
Today I've recorded the guitar solo to the Tycho Brahe song, and a gentle solo afterwards in a modified DX7 instrument which sounds rather lovely. How I love these synthetic sounds compared to samples. It's odd how much I dislike cold and automatic sequenced music, yet I create it all the time. Deb commented that The Girl With The Pearl Earring sounds like Depeche Mode, and indeed it does, with all of the implications of sound quality and horror. I know, however, that I can add more feeling.
The whole album is now 21 minutes long, but feels near an end, which is not very good. I keep waving between disliking all of it and every album I've done since The Dusty Mirror, and liking it all, recognising the progress, and seeing the output, optimism, energy, and art.
Artists, no matter how inventive, end up specialising and producing the same sort of thing. This can't be helped, and is mainly because too much variety requires too much energy, and always means waking up in a new desert, a new battle in an obscure world that cares nothing for one's new ideas. Artists become successful when their work becomes all the same. Picasso and Edward Hopper didn't change their style for their last 50 years. Paul McCartney charged into classical music and found a new desert there; people wanted his old pop. Artists who change 'a bit' rather than radically are considered the best.
I'll keep doing what I've done, instrumental, and vocal music, adding bits here and there. In visual art oils will remain my medium, and in writing prose and poetry of a unified sort. All works must be unified structurally... now is the time to add this to this album. The albums which are not structured or themed; The Dusty Mirror and Secret Electric Sorcery were made as training grounds, and feel artistically weak to me now, if produced well.
