“…arts and culture contributes $877.8 billion (or 4.5%) to the nation’s gross domestic product…”
DIRECTOR'S NOTE | THE PHOTOGRAPHER
There is a need for modern opera in the Puget Sound area, and Whidbey Island is the perfect venue to fill this need.
While there are many professional orchestras in the Seattle area that provide a wide variety of musical programming, there are few opera companies. The Seattle Opera has the highest profile, and there is a smaller opera company based on Vashon Island. But other groups mounting opera are few and rare.
One would think that having a major opera company like Seattle Opera would fulfill most of the public’s need for this special kind of theatrical and musical presentation, but the Seattle Opera draws almost exclusively on older romantic-era operas, like Puccini and Verdi. Notably, they also produce Wagner’s The Ring every few years. These operas are wonderful, and very popular with their audience, but there is an almost complete absence of modern opera. Indeed, modern music in general is rarely performed in the Puget Sound area.
By modern I mean the sea-change of style and substance after Charles Ives broke all the rules of classical music at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Classical music for a hundred years became more atonal, and incorporated polyrhythms and dissonance to create a modern soundtrack inspired by the bustle of cites, industries, mechanization, and the forces of modern life.
As time went on, this music became less accessible to many concert goers, who often seek something beautiful, and not disturbing. Sometime modern music is actually shocking. When Stravinsky premiered The Rite Of Spring in 1913 in Paris, the audience rioted and tore the seats out of the opera house. Now, a hundred years later, we accept Stravinsky into the standard repertory, and find it hard to believe people would react that way. But today’s audiences, in fact, favor 19th century classical music, and as a result programmers avoid the more daring of 20th Century modernists. This is especially true in the world of opera.
But opera has a great history through the 20th Century, from Britten to Bartok, which moved beyond romantic conventions, and were much more daring. And finally, in the late 20th Century, there was an explosion of creativity from Glass, Adams, and a new generation of composers who continue to write today. These later composers finally reverse the atonality of the earlier decades, embracing consonance and melody, and brought other modern values to the music, some of which is very accessible, yet rarely performed.
We seek to end the dearth of modern opera by creating an opera unit on Whidbey Island that will bring modern music to modern audiences. People must be exposed to new forms or they will never know they like them. And liking them, they will demand more.
Whidbey Island is the perfect incubator for this project. Located just outside Seattle, the most devoted of opera fans will take the effort to make the easy commute from the metro area for something unusual and exciting. Locally, Whidbey itself is home to a world-class audience, which has been cultivated by decades of intelligent programming from the Whidbey Island Center for the Arts and the Saratoga Orchestra, both well known for quality performances.
But being slightly off the beaten track is a benefit for the actual production, based on the fact that costs for musicians and performers on Whidbey is significantly lower than recruiting and casting from the professional Seattle environment. Yet the quality of players is as top notch as any in the region. This means we can produce high-quality work for a fraction of the cost of the major city producers. And this makes experimentation and risks are far easier to manage. When a major production is mounted in Seattle, or San Francisco, or Los Angeles, the costs can be prohibitive unless the program concept is pre-sold to area subscribers and patrons. Thus the safe choices that are made by these urban companies. But Whidbey can push the leading edge of art and music in a way that is simply financially impossible for larger companies.
Additionally, after creating more daring opera, the most successful shows can be put on the road in the region, and will find many opportunities to recoup investments and development through additional performances to art-hungry audiences throughout the Pacific Northwest. Including Seattle.
In this way, Whidbey Island is a safe haven, an incubator for new and exciting tastes, a laboratory that will test the appeal of modern music and theater, art that speaks to our age, in our own time. And art that will spread and grow from this isolated island into the world at large. Whidbey Center for the Arts has the opportunity to be the center of this new renaissance.
By Tim Everitt, Director
RELATED PROGRAMMING: THE PHOTOGRAPHER | MAR 20-22, 2020
MEET THE ARTIST | MARK ROTHKO
One of the preeminent artists of his generation, Mark Rothko is closely identified with the New York school, a circle of painters that emerged during the 1940s as a new collective voice in American art. During a career that spanned five decades, he created a new and impassioned form of abstract painting.
Rothko's work is characterized by rigorous attention to formal elements such as color, shape, balance, depth, composition, and scale; yet, he refused to consider his paintings solely in these terms. He explained: "It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing."
By 1949 Rothko had introduced a compositional format that he would continue to develop throughout his career. Composed of several vertically aligned rectangular forms set within a colored field, Rothko's "image" lent itself to a remarkable diversity of appearances.
In these works, large scale, open structure, and thin layers of color combine to convey the impression of a shallow pictorial space. Color, for which Rothko's work is perhaps most celebrated, here attains an unprecedented luminosity.
His classic paintings of the 1950s are characterized by expanding dimensions and an increasingly simplified use of form, brilliant hues, and broad, thin washes of color. In his large, floating rectangles of color, which seem to engulf the spectator, he explored with a rare mastery of nuance the expressive potential of color contrasts and modulations…
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RELATED PROGRAMMING: RED | FEB 07-22, 2020
RELATED PROGRAMMING: ART TALKS: MARK ROTHKO | FEB 19, 2020
SOURCE: National Gallery of Art
ARTICLE | Mark Rothko on How to Be an Artist
Famed Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko believed that art was a powerful form of communication. “The fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions,” he said in an interview in 1956. “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”
Through canvases of floating forms and glowing, suspended rectangles, Rothko sought to create a profound connection between artist, canvas, and viewer. What’s more, he asserted that his works not only expressed human emotion, but also stimulated psychological and emotional experiences in those who witnessed them. “Painting is not about an experience,” he told LIFE magazine in 1959. “It is an experience.”
While Rothko believed his paintings spoke for themselves—and routinely derided art critics who attempted to explain his practice with words—that didn’t stop him from developing his own theories about the power of art and the creative process. Throughout his career, from the late 1920s until his death in 1970, the New York–based painter amassed a body of writing and gave a number of interviews that reveal his views on how creativity can be unlocked and encouraged. Below, we highlight several of Rothko’s words of wisdom… read more.
SOURCE: Artsy
ARTICLE | The #MeToo Moment: Art Inspired by the Reckoning
The first known feminist-art program in the United States was established in the fall of 1970 at the California Institute of the Arts. Judy Chicago (artist and educator) formed the art collective known as “Womanhouse” because, as she put it, “women artists were simply not taken seriously.”
Two decades later, the Guerrilla Girls forced attention to the fine art world’s gender and racial disparity with their gorilla masks and guerrilla-style stunts. (“Guerrilla Girls’ definition of a hypocrite?” read one poster. “An art collector who buys white male art at benefits for liberal causes, but never buys art by women or artists of color.”)
From Picasso’s Guernica — observed as a cry against the atrocities of the Spanish War — to the graffiti of the Arab Spring, social movements and injustice have long inspired art of all forms. The #MeToo Moment is no exception.
Explore works inspired by the #MeToo movement here.
SOURCE: The New York Times
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TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES: #METOO AND THE NEW SEXUAL LANDSCAPE | JUL 27, 2019