the force that through the green fuse drives the flower – prints available
Once I activate the comparison area of my brain – I am lost!
I noticed this while recording the soundscape for the Portals exhibition coming up in a few days now. I recorded the vocal tracks and kept the first takes. If I made more takes, I would start comparing them, and then I would be looking for ‘better’ than one arbitrary measure (the first take), rather than making something in accordance with the absolute measure of the present moment and the challenge I had set myself in it.
I could of course delete the first ones if they were not right, and make another first one.
That’s really different from having versions 1,2,3… and comparing them. I can feel my brain switch, and it’s not into the place where the good stuff comes from!
Thanks to this method I have some very wavery vocal takes, that fulfil the challenge I set myself, to allow real voices to sing around a bonfire, from across spaces and times, to be a part of the soundscape and the landscape and the exhibition-scape. Not to perform music but to let the voices through.
I wonder how this no-comparison rule I noticed today applies to painting. I have to be quite ruthless with it, I think. Again it leads to a lot of scrubbing out or painting over of a place in the painting that isn’t right, working directly on top rather than creating another version. The version we’re in is a multi-layered thing.