NINA SIMONE'S GUM

I recently read Nina Simone's Gum by Warren Ellis. I enjoyed it profoundly. Like the best books, it told me as many things about myself as it told of the teller and the tale. As I learnt about Warren and his journey with the chewed gum he rescued from Nina Simone's post-concert piano, it provoked me to think deeply about all sorts of past experiences, people and feelings. 

I felt my life-long internal conflict between collecting and possessional anti-sentimentality, that not rages but peters perpetually, stoked.

My daughter is a born collector. Of everything, every scrap of nothing. I love it. This book made me realise that the value is never the object, it's in it being chosen by her. The intangible emotions now stored in an unremarkable pebble that can only really be unlocked and felt by me. The pebble, the scrap, becomes a conduit for the emotional bond between us. And this, of course, is how Nina's gum works, too.
The book also seemed to validate a lifetime of following the shadows of serendipity, of trusting whims enough to be guided by them. Of seeing the connections in our lives, with other people and the things we use and create. And the beauty of these connections and how items, collaboration and individual expertise and knowledge combine with imagination to foster bonds and increase the emotional, even spiritual, resonance in all directions.
I don't hold many, if any, in higher regard to Nina Simone and her work, but although I knew some of Warren Ellis' work with Nick Cave, this book led me to listen to his band The Dirty Three. I'm now immersed in their LP Horse Stories, and it somehow feels right that I've only just found these songs, despite the album being over twenty years old. And so here is sketch of Warren Ellis. I wanted his hands to somehow be prominent. They felt important in the story, of the gum and also his life. Read the book and consider what is precious and why.

INFO-GRAPHIC OR GRAPHIC INFO?

Above shows an info-graphic I produced for recently defunct classical music website Sinfini.
On the left is the initial idea, based on the look of the Ordnance Survey maps; as one of the facts is the mapping agency birthdate.

After a change in the facts, this map idea didn't really work and the whole thing really became less of an info-graphic and more of an illustrated fact-sheet.
I re-worked the idea (correcting the featured instrument shape, as it turns out I don't know my Basset Clarinet from my Basset Horn Clarinet), reverting to a colour palette I had come up with earlier for the same site, for another Clarinet Concerto feature.

My idea was to pull apart the instrument in the same way that the given facts reveal the separate parts of the Concerto itself. The result is quite Cubist, although Picasso wasn't in my thoughts as I was doing it, and maybe that is why I think, and hope, it doesn't appear as a pastiche. 

I prefer the second attempt, but can't help but feel the initial aim of producing an info-graphic was lost. It seems that too often any information with an image is labelled as such, whereas I feel it should represent the data in a way that wouldn't be clearly understood just by looking at the facts; the relationship between them, for example, from which new conclusions can be surmised.
This is a problem when the 'data' is really descriptive facts, and although I made some attempt in the map version, it doesn't quite work...so it was probably best to abandon any pretence and just produce a graphic-info, to coin a phrase.

To see the two pieces above in more detail, I have popped them up on Pinterest.

If anyone is interested in maps and the Ordnance Survey, I can recommend a documentary I watched recently on BBC4 - available here if you fancy.

MOZART SYMPHONY NUMBER 40: ANIMATED

In order to generate some interest in SinfiniMusic's online Masterworks series, I was asked to provide a 30 second visualisation of the recognisable section of Mozart's Symphony Number 40, using the still graphic I originally provided for the site as the starting point.

I enlisted the help of seasoned animators Freak to bring to life and make some coherent sense of my ideas. As my first animation, this was an educational experience, with plenty to learn and hopefully build on with some future animation work. Do get in touch with any ideas for collaborative work.

To see the complete video go here.

MESSIAEN: QUARTET FOR THE END OF TIME

75 years ago, on 15th January 1941, Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time was premiered in the prisoner-of-war camp where the composer was interned during World War II.

Classical music website Sinfini have produced an astonishing visualisation to accompany the first movement 'Crystal Liturgy', animated by Simon Russell.

There is a detailed explanation for the rationale behind this beautiful video explaining the importance of numbers and mathematics. This includes the Golden Ratio concept, which is what I took as the starting point to complete my accompanying info-graphic seen above.

The intention of the info-graphic was to place the piece in the context of the year 1941 and what was happening elsewhere in the world, in a visually attractive way that represents the facts in a memorable way, hopefully leading people to listen to the music.