Art, Music & Architecture
Dancing around a fiery cauldron bubbling with delicious goblin cuisine ingredients is in stark contrast to coping with real time global dangers that encroach upon our conciousness. Living in art and music is starlight as darkness and its inky blackness thicken and roll out the last glimmers of the day.
And then there is music for the next morning…
Oh the stormy winds do blow,
with the landlubbers down below,
And the sailor-men a-climbing to the top,
To haul in the riggin’-o.
T’was Sunday night, our sails were set
We hardly cleared the land-o,
When we spied a mermaid a-swimming by,
A comb and a glass in her hand-o.
The captain plumbed with a lead and a line,
He plumbed for to reach the sand-o,
While the winds and the waves did toss and roar,
We knew we’d never see land-o.
Then three times ’round went our gallant ship,
And three times more went she,
And the mate and the cabin boy said goodbye,
As we sank in the salt, salt sea.
Listen to my recent musical composition entitled, ” She Runs Through My Mind Like an Apparition” for guitar, concertina, and mandolin. My boxwood engraving of a vine covered oak is evocative of the haunted James River floodplain in Virginia. The musical composition is reminiscent of stories sung in ballads that migrated from Europe and Africa to the southern regions of North America. The diverse musical instruments express the fleeting polyphonic thoughts that run through my mind, forever changing in time. I fondly acknowledge my son, Adam Bender for assisting me with graphic layout and production. Sandy Bender
“Two Dancing Pigs” was improvised by playing harmonica and guitar simultaneously. Any discomfort in physically managing two instruments was alleviated through closed-eye visualization of two dancing pigs squealing with delight in each other’s company. The artwork is a detail of the pastel drawing used in my previous post, “The Listening Drum.” Looking closer allows one to see two dark pig-like shapes appear (among other creatures such as a spider, a bat, or a raven’s tail). Perhaps, rainbow colored waves are perceived as dancing while the pig duo floats and soars overhead in sea spray and thermal undulations. A colorful drawing appearing to depict a single slice in time awakens and sequentially shape-shifts to melodic rhythms of musical joy.
You can find “Two Dancing Pigs” and other pieces on Sandy Bender’s album Terrain.
“A Brief Passion”
A passion can pass,
In a twinkle of an eye,
A leeward glance,
A breath and a sigh,
Inhaled fragrance,
With luster of jade,
Horizons of memories,
That never fade.
Sanford R. Bender April 19, 2021
My drawings of Cathedrale Notre-Dame d’Amiens from the thirteenth century were drawn while researching Gothic architecture, and how cathedrals in France were being constructed with arches, vaulted ceilings, flying buttresses, and stained glass windows. After drawing the horizontal and vertical lines of the structure with straight edge and triangle, I soon became entranced and astonished by how consecutive arcs drawn with a compass established a rhythm that appeared to dance gracefully across the page. The visual motion of the arcade struck me deeply as being musical, my other passion. The original guitar composition, “A lull in the battle”, inspired by medieval music, is what I imagined as being evocative of an exhausted knight pausing from battle, only to reflect and mourn a bygone romance.