A slightly different thing today, I need to write this down before EarthBall return to London again tonight some four days on to play with Orcutt Shelley Miller, for four days ago, last Friday I painted at North London’s Cafe Oto while glorious Canadian avant noise/freeform jazz rock band EarthBall played a headline set at the start of a UK/European tour they are now on. They invited me to come paint, a result I think of something I might have said in one of the many rather positive EarthBall reviews on these pages, something along the lines of how their music makes me want to paint. Truth is lots of things make me want to paint, it is mostly what I do, I am first and foremost a painter. Actually, as some of you might already know, we started this Organ thing way back in a very different world of the last century when we were both teenage art students some thirty nine and a bit years ago, we are artists (or at least like to think we are), And yes, listening to EarthBall recordings very loudly does makes me want to paint, listening to EarthBall recordings very loudly does make me want to try and get on their wavelength and go with their flow. I adore the way they grab hold of something and just go with it and won’t let it go, I love the way that saxophone sometimes screams, I love the almost ecstatic feel of it all, the primal ritual, the way vocals and the lyrics, when you can catch them, joust around the boundaries between chaos and clarity. And there is lots of clarity, I do like the way they grab hold of a musical line and just won’t let it go, I like EarthBall rather a lot and so the invite (or was it a challenge?) to come paint with them was more than gratefully accepted.
So last Friday afternoon I grabbed my easel a new unviolated freshly bought big blank (deep edge) canvas along with a bag of paints, a big brush or two, I put on a red t-shirt and headed for the soundcheck at Cafe Oto. The band had marked out a spot right beside them, just to the right of their stage. Actually there isn’t really a stage at Oto, I set up on the floor within paint splatting distance of John Brennan’s drum kit. Besides painting the deep edges of the new canvas red before hand (because I know it both be a difficult and a distraction on the night), the canvas beast was left completely blank and gleaming white, waiting there on the easel, waiting for their first sounds…
Now I wasn’t expecting the beautifully sarcastic whit of comedian Stewart Lee, it does make sense that that he and the band should share a mutual appreciation of each other’s art, they do both like to grab hold of a riff or something that someone might have said and just not let it go, rather like a pear cider that’s made from 100% pears (look it up on YouTube or listen to the first track on the most recent EarthBall studio album or maybe go ask Stewart’s fellow comedian Mark Watson. Mr Lee is my favourite comedian by far and EarthBall have probably been my favourite band for a couple of years now, I kind of expected him to be at the gig, I wasn’t expecting him standing by my right shoulder as the band made their first sounds and I squeezed out my first hit of paint.
The place is full, there’s people all around me, my intention was to hit blank canvas with paint as soon as the band started, I (stupidly) hadn’t considered just how dark it would be in there, that I wouldn’t really be able to see what I was painting, it was obviously going to be dark, you live and learn (I’ve put on hundreds of gigs, thousands of them, I should have known how dark it would be in there) and I should have checked on the plans for the EarthBall performance, I kind of thought Steward Lee was going to introduce them and leave them to hit the ground running in that way only EarthBall can, I was expecting to hit the ground running to, I wasn’t really expecting them to back a five or so minute exploration of the diary of the owl who rather foolishly took to the sea in a beautiful pea-green boat with, of all beasts, a pussycat, in such a restrained musical manner. So now instead of going full in with paint that responds to an expected avant noise onslaught, instead I find myself vaguely painting owls, cats and moons as I set out to destroy the white of the canvas.
The white of a canvas in always a challenge, there is almost defiance on the part of the canvas, it must be covered, tamed, controlled, defeated, it almost dares you to do so. In hindsight my second mistake (the first being not considering the lighting) was to not let Mr. Lee do his (brilliant) thing before starting, I (rather obviously) should have just waited, I’m (wrongly) improvising and reacting to to what Stewart is saying and that is not what I wanted to be doing, it threw me, I have the white of the canvas covered before he’s left the band to it, there’s a bloody big owl, cats ears. No! The owl and the cat are still there, you can’t see them but I know they are there under the layers…
Once the band get going I do as well (or at least try to), but I can’t see! I’m frantically screaming tubes, well squeezing tubes, “screaming” was the work of the auto-corrector, the auto-correction is probably being more accurate that me and I’m squeezing screaming tubes onto a second canvas and, as I always do, using that as a palette. Now I had, on the day before the gig, fired up EarthBall’s excellent Outside Over There album, and while it loudly blasted in my studio just once, I took a fresh canvas and painted it, I considered it a practice piece, a warm up, it was a more than useful exercise, the result was probably a little more satisfying than the result on the actual night. So I can’t really see in the venue, the band have kindly given me a small clip on light but it isn’t really helping me see. I have no real idea in terms of how the colour is working on the canvas and colour really is a big big part of my painting practice, maybe the main consideration? I am mostly using various tubes of red and crimson acrylic along with a rather big brush, EarthBall do feel like a rather red band and probably not just because bass player and vocalist Isabel Ford’s rather striking habit of always boldly wearing red (which is why I turned up in an old red t-shirt from a previous art event that required a red shirt).
So I’m in the dark squeezing tubes, I’ve got people all around me, painting is usually a private thing – although I have painted live in public on the street, in galleries, at Upfest, it isn’t that allien to paint in public, to almost perform – So I’m in the dark, I’m being photographed and filmed, I’m there in the sight-line of most who are watching the band and I really can’t see what I’m doing. I can’t see the colour, it mostly feels like I have a brown strew of paint on the canvas and I’m almost blindly guessing what adding more red will result in. I’m trying to react to the band, actually I’m behind the monitors rather than in front, this is different, I can’t really get the full sound, the full band, the full power, I’m watching the movement of the drummer, I’m occasionally catching an eye or a nod. I’m not a musician, I imagine this is how jams work, picking up on movement, catching a signal, watching Izzy as she nods, watching John Brennan as he changes things on his drums, trying to catch where the guitar is going or when the saxophone is going to wildly lead us all, I’m squeezing blue paint, a bit of yellow, more bright red, almost violently squeezing tubes, just moving with the speed of the band, trying to move the with movement of the drums, trying to get with their flow, trying to be be part of it, be at one with it all and I’m rather surprised that not I’m really hearing the full band, I’m not hearing the set like I would as part of an audience, not hearing the full body as much as the details. Actually I’m rather looking forward to properly seeing and hearing them again tonight, I don’t think I really saw or heard them last Friday night, I was too busy reacting. Actually i have no idea how long they played for, it went by really quickly, I kept ON painting all the way through, only stopping once Stewart Lee joined them at the end to perform an outrageously under-rehearsed gloriously freeform jazz-punk version of the Robert Calvert/Hawkwind classic Ejection, a brilliant version actually, not sure how familiar this audience are with Captain Lockheed but those who do are wearing great big shit-eating grins as is Stewart Lee, that was certainly an ending to a show! I had stopped before Stewart’s return though, it felr like I had gone as far as i could go on the night.
I’m mostly frustrated at the end of the set, it doesn’t feel like it has really worked, that I really got whatever it was I was trying to get, I’m in the dark, I still am when the house lights come on, Mr Lee takes a look over my shoulder, “yeah, that’s exactly what it sounded like…” he says, I take that to be his acid whit rather than accurate comment. I don’t really like what I see, other seem positive, the band do, there’s people taking photos, asking questions, offering compliments, I still can’t see it properly in the gloom of the gallery, someone asks if he can buy it, it is still very wet and anyway, I want to take it home and have look, have a think about it. I want to look properly, it doesn’t feel like it has worked in here. I won’t actually properly get to look at the painting (or the smaller canvas) until the cold light on the next morning. I’ve washed out my brushes in the toilet, chatted with people and I’m carrying a big wet canvas home from venue, no bus ride with all this wet paint!
I loved doing it, I really liked trying to connect with it all, I think I maybe might have had something somewhere around mid set, it was a battle, a battle I think I lost. I’d love to try again, I learnt a lot, I would maybe take a tube of gold paint with me next time. on the whole I don’t think it worked. By the next morning I’m being asked by people to post photos of it on social media and I can already see film of me painting behind the band. I see other people have already posted their photos taken in the bad light that makes the piece look even worse than it maybe is. I don’t feel I want to post my own image of it, it is a reasonable request though and I’m certainly not so disappointed that I just want to just write it all off, it isn’t a total failure, so I do share a photo of it on my social media at some point on the morning after the night before, which the band and others immediately re-share which in turn causes more interaction and more questions (all very much welcome). And now the painting has been sitting here in the studio we live in, there is no escaping it, there it looking at me over the weekend, greeting me in the morning, actually I do need to look at it, I don’t want to turn it to face the wall quite yet and now I’m trying to write about the process and the experience and post it all before I go see the band again tonight and that colours things in a different way again.
Right now, to answer a question I’ve been asked several times already, I don’t know what I am going to do with the painting yet. I do generally spend a lot of time looking at my paintings before making the next move, sometime a painting can sit here for months waiting before I work on it again (I exhibited two recent painted paintings last week, two paintings that have both now told me they need a lemon and a pear added rather desperately. I don’t know what happens with the EarthBall at Cafe Oto painting, it will probably sit here in full view for days or maybe weeks, it might eventually stay as it is, it should really, it was about that moment, to paint on it now would be like a band going into the studio and adding bits to their supposedly live album afterwards. Then again it might be worked on a little more and who can’t say that whatever Thin Lizzy did in the studio to the live recordings that make Live and Dangerous a far better record of something that essentially happened live didn’t improve things? I might work on this painting a little more, I don’t really know yet. I might make visual notes at tonight’s EarthBall gig and then work on it some more when I get home later. I might eventually just paint over it, whitewash it and use the canvas and some of the texture left to do something new. i will certainly work on the other canvas, the ‘palette’ canvas. Whatever happens, I loved doing it, this is all something to be continued. A big thanks to EarthBall, Cafe Oto, Christopher and Upset The Rhythm and yes, a big thanks to Stewart Lee (probably). And yes, I do need to write about the two other bands (duos) on the bill, I haven’t forgotten that, both CIA Debutante and Split Apex proved to be worthy of attention (watch this space) and watch this space in terms of what happens with this painting, there was talk of of the Oto set being the next in the series of EarthBall live album releases and that it might be needed as part of the cover. Right now I’m enjoying the texture of the painting rather than the look of it… Watch this space, to be continued… (Sean Worrall)
Previously on these pages…
THE ORGAN 