Oil, pen, copper patina, copper wire, phosphor bronze, steel and wood on canvas, 2018.
38 x 36”
SOLD
Feldeinsamkeit (Johannes Brahms) No. 2, Opus 86 by Britt Conley. A friend of mine suggested I create a work for Brahms Feldeinsamkeit. This lyric, work for piano and solo male voice, was new to me. We looked over the piece and lyrics while we listened. It turns out Brahms wrote the work after reading the poem of the same name. In English it means solitude in the fields.
I lie quietly in the high green grass
And for a long time I gaze at the sky
Surrounded by the ceaseless chirping of the crickets
Enmeshed wondrously by Heaven’s azure.
The beautiful white clouds are moving
Through the deep blue like lovely quiet dreams.
To me the poem represents a lovely gestalt. I wanted to capture the writers experience as well as the beauty of Brahms. The white and grey background represent the streaming big, white, fluffy clouds, moving across the sky as viewed from below. I hand-wound piano wire to crimp into symbols of crickets. I then draped more, lose piano wire to represent the intermingling of all the crickets together and the beauty of that sound. The work was shown at a group show at The Huntington Museum of Art.