Two weeks ago I finally exported the final version of ‘Breaking the Code’ filmclip out of the Premiere Project and the day after uploaded it to Youtube site and linked to Website.
This ‘lockdown project’ has been the fruit of a wonderful relationship with two paintings created by my friend Vikki Nash.
The piece of music ‘Breaking the Code’ was number four of an eight part collection of pieces called ‘Solar Flare Jazz Suite’ which the band performed in 2018 at The Lost Ones in Ballarat , of which we managed to record it in the same year, albeit incomplete.
The painting that inspired the Suite was one that I bought from her earlier that year, called ‘Union ll’ and it took me a couple of months pontificating on it to intellectually have a sense of its meaning.
All I knew was, that it symbolised something about higher consciousness and energy.
'Union ll' by Vikki Nash 2018
Finally I cross examined Vikki one more time and she said that I could consider the image as representing something akin to the step down transformers between the power lines in our streets.
The power is too great to come straight into our houses and so has to be reduced in current to become useable.
‘Step down transformer’ became a key phrase scribbled on my music manuscript.
Thus with thoughts too, higher frequencies of awareness ( spirit or soul consciousness, God consciousness) are too rarefied to be heard or understood, and so have to be interpreted in worldly terms.
My attempt to display this in a creative way, was through the music of this Suite.
Creativity and the arts feels like a worldly doorway between the human mind and the bodiless non physical world.
The painting ‘Union ll’ was a catalyst for me to create a body of music which encapsulated that feeling which has been with me for quite some time.
Vikki had shown me another painting called ‘The Strong Eye’ and I was very struck by it. Not knowing her intended meaning with it, I organised to have someone photograph it in super high resolution ( 430Mb) , thinking that it would be useful for something later on.
'The Strong Eye' by Vikki Nash 2017
During lockdown, I decided to use the painting as the backdrop for the filmclip.
I decided to use it because I thought the painting was a beautiful continuation of the theme of ‘stepping down’ from a higher plane to the world below.
I thought the painting had the spirit of aboriginal paintings in which I’d read that the artists shamanically fly above the landscape and paint what they see through their mind’s eye.
I thought it would be a great visual exploration of a theme where I would somehow filmicly make the musicians (who were the instruments of threading down higher frequencies of consciousness in to the world through their art of sound making) fly around in a kind of ‘ landing pattern’ like aeroplanes across the earth, of which the painting would be the artistic representation the earth.
I actually began with sections in the painting that were greatly magnified, so that it was initially unrecognisable and then as it panned across , the ‘countryside’ of the painting would gradually unfold.
When I told her about my intention and response to the painting, she said that the painting was born out of study that she’d done in regard to the aboriginal painters and the idea of the ‘Strong Eye’ or ‘seeing’ in a different way.”
In fact , she’d done a thesis on it ( which was a further string to the bow of someone who was a practicing artist, art therapist and psychic healer).
Two academic references she gave were from ‘Altered Consciousness and Modern Art’ by Mark Levy and also ‘Excluded Spaces: The Figure in the Australian Aboriginal Landscape’ by Nacy D. Munn.
In the end , in amongst all the editing difficulties, it has been an enjoyable , creative and spiritually satisfying project.
I hope you enjoy the images and the music, and gain some feeling of the journey of the soul,
love to all,
Michael Westlake