Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-08-08 - 9:54 a.m.

The weather has got worse. But the girls still might go canoeing this afternoon - this has come up as one of the favourites of all the activities tried.

There is one painting that I have done that seems to go furthest in a direction that I would want to follow. Its cool - not many marks - but strong relationships between some of the marks made. Still representational but not documentary like some of the other stuff I have done - and also not obviously in the watercolour genre.

I am listening to Wednesday Afternoon a lot - they say this is the first piece composed for CD - by B Eno with the help of G Mumma. It is a piece of process music - the loops are set and allowed to run. To me it seems more like ambient music than (eg) Music for Airports.

I still feel I am making progress with the picollo. I am not sure I have ever concentrated on it for a whole 2 weeks before. The lowest note on the instrument is approx 1k Hz - two octaves up from that is 4k Hz - so the second harmonic on that note is getting to the end of the human audio range. When I go for notes above that then quite often I hit them "dirtily". The result is a cluster of frequencies - I suppose in the 5k-15kHz range. I am wondering about the potency of these sounds when overlaying eg brass stabs. This is an area to look into when I get back.

I am about half way through the Berger book on Picasso. He sees P as isolated by his talent except in the few years around 1910 when he was collaborating with others esp Braque on developing Cubism. Berger alos believes that the quality of the work goes off rather after the early 50s - after a series of paintings which look from the perspective of old age on the nature of human happiness. As he discusses these works, B drops in various poems, not always explaining why they are there. One such is a W B Yeats Crazy Jane poem.

I have yet to find a really good discussion of the Cazy Jane / Hazey Jane linkages. One might be that both are concerned with a kind of Paradise Foregone or Innocence clouded by Experience. That would just be a first cut - I think there is also something self-referential there about the artwork as a means of approaching what has been lost, savouring it and then letting it slip through one's fingers, to experience the loss a second time.

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