LARC Group Project

L(indsey)

A(lex)

R(enata)

C(hris)

While the name of our group seems obvious, our approach and aim was far from that. Lindsey (a film editor), Alex (an actress), Renata (a fine artist) and myself (a pianist), were anxious to avoid the obvious (a movie featuring acting, a musical soundtrack, and a set design) in combining our skills for this project. We discussed a number of possibilities before we truly arrived at a decent premise for our work. In combining our artistic talent, we decided to conduct a type of experiment, rather than produce a physical piece of work.

The basis of our experiment was a canvas painting of Renata's. Alex and I did not know what the painting looked like at all during the time of the experiment. We relied on descriptions given to us (independently) by Lindsey, who acted as the middleman throughout the project. The goal was to have Lindsey meet with Alex and I individually and explain the various qualities of Renata's painting. Based on these descriptions, Alex and I were to select pieces of work in our respective fields that we felt truly reflected what we were being told. Essentially the idea of this project was to (hopefully) reveal how artists, whether in the same field or not, interpret art and words in very similar and dissimilar fashions.

Lindsey described to me something that was desolate and tragic, a large blob of black with intersecting yellow rays. From her description, I picked a piece of music that I felt appropriately conveyed this feeling of tragedy and bareness: the Piano Sonata by Leos Janacek, a czech composer. Janacek wrote this piece in response to the death of a fellow countryman who was bayoneted at the University of Brno during a student protest by German soldiers during the World War I occupation of Czechoslovakia. It depicts the aftermath of his death in the second movement (which I used) through a very somber and sparsely textured funeral march. To me, the tragedy was the black blob that upset the hopeful rays of yellow in Renata's painting.

Once the project finally came to fruition, Alex and I were finally exposed to Renata's painting and to each other's interpretations of her art. For me, the Janacek Sonata seemed like a nice fit with Renata's work. With Lindsey's help, she picked an excerpt from Julius Caesar, a monologue by Portia. To my surprise, Alex's choice was similar in principle to the Janacek that I chose to reflect Renata's work. It too conveyed this idea of bleak tragedy and an apparent lack of hope. For the presentation we compared our approaches and explained exactly what inspired our choices. It was an experiment that had potential to yield very different results, but in the end, there turned out to be more similarities than differences in Alex's artistic choices and mine.