"Conroy" by Cake

As I read “Seeing” by Annie Dillard, one little anecdote jumped out at me. It was only one sentence and it described how a photography professor happened to see a bird die midflight one day. The first thing that impacted me about this was how random and unique of a thing that would be to see, but then something else struck me. Why was he looking up? This idea of knowing where and how to look was explained and addressed throughout this whole article, but that moment of looking up was what really inspired me. I loved how Dillard talked about seeing things from fresh eyes and from fresh points of view and I wanted to create a piece that had specific meaning to me and yet could be readily used to tell an equally specific story to someone else.

As I listened to “Conroy” by Cake, I tried to start with a fresh slate. I wanted to have nothing else on my mind as tried to “look up” at this piece. As soon as I started listening to it, it took my mind back to the first time I heard this song. It was a year or so ago and I was sitting angry in traffic. As soon as the song came on my anger evaporated, my mind was filled with ideas and my body with joy. I was so struck by the song that I just listened to it over and over until I was out of traffic. Its odd mixture of sounds forced my mind to make stories. It’s this story telling quality that made me so enthusiastic about wanting to work on this piece.

As I began to paint I thought about Storm Thorgerson who did artwork for bands such as Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. Each of his pieces have a story telling quality that compliments and at the same time stands alone from the work that it was inspired by.

In my piece I wanted each image to speak for a moment in the song, but I wanted the combination of these images to be what tells the story. I wanted the colors as well as the images to mirror each other and yet be very different in their content. The images needed to be viewed together so that they could highlight how different they are from each other. In the song we hear sounds that are not normally heard together, and that combination is what brings such vivid story lines and images into the mind of the listener. This idea of combining ideas to make new ideas so perfectly embodied the concept of looking at things with fresh eyes and from different points of view. In my painting I tried to tell a story that was specific to me, yet was ambiguous enough for each new pair of eyes to create a different story.