REHEARSAL DRAWINGS (2019 - )
Academy of Ancient Music (AAM)
Created as some of the world’s greatest musicians rehearse and perform in some incredible settings, this ongoing series of drawings are my immediate and intuitive response to live orchestral and vocal music.
Collected as Rehearsal Drawings, in these works I seek to find visual form for specific sections and pieces of music as experienced in real-time in particular settings. They pursue a visual means to preserve the extraordinary aural, emotional and visual impact of the music of the AAM and collaborators as it was experienced - in many cases by me for the first time - in live rehearsal and performance. Music - to heart - to paper. In some of these drawings, elements of architecture, suggestions of musicians and other figurative passages insist, invariably transformed by the power of their own sound. In others, music finds its own abstract form, mutating or overwriting all figurative elements entirely. In the best works perhaps, a balance is struck in which music, its impact and its setting evolve simultaneously – each inherent to the other – akin to the way live music is experienced. To all I have met and drawn with, thank you, it was an honour. I hope something of the music and the spirit of the performances lives on in my drawings. ES 2019 |
REHEARSAL DRAWINGS:
Handel's Messiah, Trinity College Chapel, Cambridge, December 2019 Viktoria Mullova, Malvern Theatres / Milton Court Concert Hall, London, November 2019 Rejoice!, Rowan Pierce & David Blackadder, October 2019 Beethoven's Egmont, Barbican, London, October 2019 VOCES8, Milton Abbey International Music Festival, 29 July - 3 August 2019 Nicola Benedetti - Concertos, Cheltenham Music Festival, July 2019 Handel'sIsrael in Egypt, Conductor Gergeley Madaras and the BBC Singers, May 2019 |
Barbican Concert Hall - my sound booth 'studio'!