September 30, 2015

September 30, 2015

After finding a piece to do for the Rolling Stones, I was still without a Beatles song.  I considered lots of Beatles songs.  Several do not lend themselves to a visual, several are extremely depressing (and I am currently working on one of those—more on that later).  I settled on’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ but something happened on the way to the club, and I ended up doing ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ instead.  Now Lucy is a crazy song with strange images.  I looked at 5-year old Julian Lennon’s original drawing which inspired the song (or rather the title he gave it inspired the song.)  I looked at some surrealistic versions of the image that other people created.  I decided to be true to the words in the song, but to also be true to the child’s viewpoint of the world. 

My Lucy is in the sky, in fact, she is on a separate canvas slightly right and above the main canvas.  She is wearing a dress made from holographic paper which flashes diamond shapes and she also has diamond straps for the dress and diamond earrings.  A close-up of her kaleidoscope eyes is on a smaller separate canvas which is off the left side of the main canvas.  And the third separate canvas is of the newspaper taxi.  So you are getting 4 canvases in all, 3 are smaller and are firmly attached to the large scene. 

The large canvas shows the front of a boat on a river moving toward a small English village.  There is a “marmalade sky”, tangerine trees, and giant green and yellow flowers of cellophane leading up to the bridge and the fountain.  I thought long and hard about the rocking horse people and rejected several options.  (By now you have realized that I do not have the full scenes of my pieces completely worked out before starting.)  Should the people be sitting on rocking horses?  Should their bodies be like centaurs?  Well, I like my solution and wish that I had planned it from the beginning.  I put a pub in the village called ‘The Rocking Horse’, so of course, the people who go to the pub are the “rocking horse people”.  They are probably in there eating marshmallow pies right now.

This is a difficult piece to photograph since it is not rectangular.  However I am going to show you the small canvas of the kaleidoscope eyes.  I think that the holographic paper makes them look very much like a kaleidoscope image.  Come and see the entire piece—from a 5-year old’s viewpoint--at the Prairie Art Alliance starting on October 17^th.  [ I am not sure if I meant Julian Lennon or me with that one!]