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~ Because demented people need love, too.

The Perks of Being an Artist

Tag Archives: cello

Fiddle Quartet

04 Friday Aug 2017

Posted by emilypageart in art, music, painting, Uncategorized

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art, artist, bluegrass, cello, classical music, Emily Page, Emily Page Art, Emily Page artist, fiddle, music, musical instrument, oil on board, oil painting, painter, painting, photorealism, Raleigh artist, realism, realist art, viola, violin, violin head

Awhile back I posted a series of paintings of a friend’s fiddle.  It’s seen a lot of wear and tear, which gives it so much character. I love the scars that document the roadmap of its time in the world. It’s a good reminder that all the bumps and bruises we all accumulate along the way are the things that set us apart, and they don’t make us any less beautiful.

I decided to put the four paintings together as a print, which is now available here on a variety of products.

Fiddle Quartet.jpg

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Well, Cello There!

27 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by emilypageart in art, humor, mental health, music, painting, sip and paint studio, Uncategorized

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art, artist, artistry, cello, classical music, inspiration, music, musical instrument, oil on board, oil on canvas, oil painting, paint, painter, painting, stringed instrument, viola, violin

Finished up a new painting this week. That’s right. I painted! Like, painted painted, not just taught at the sip and paint studio or covered old paintings with more acrylic while I waited for my students to finish a step. It had been almost 2 months since I sat down and painted with oils and my brain was ready to explode from spending too much time in front of a computer and not enough time quietly listening to podcasts with paintbrush in hand. And 2 days later, I did it again. I know. Outta control.

Here’s the result of all that time breathing in paint fumes and turpenoid:

Cello_Compressed

Cello 12″ x 16″ oil on board $450

Original available here. Prints and other merchandise available here.

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Thanks so much for reading my ridiculous thoughts! If you’d like to see my ridiculous thoughts translated into art, visit my website, or follow me on Facebook and Twitter. Know a caregiver, or someone with dementia, or someone who knows someone with dementia, or someone who knows someone who knows someone else who’s a caregiver? Or heck, do you know a person? Well, you should tell them about my book, Fractured Memories: Because Demented People Need Love, Too. Part memoir and part coffee table art book, I recount my family’s heartbreaking and hilarious journey through my father’s dementia. Available to purchase here (this is my favorite way if you live in the U.S.), here or here if you’d rather get the eBook than a print copy, and here (especially if you want a hard cover copy).

book-cover-1

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Violin

23 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by emilypageart in art, humor, Uncategorized

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art, artist, cello, classical, classical instrument, classical music, flute, instrument, music, musical instrument, oil on board, oil painting, paint, painter, painting, stringed instrument, viola, violin

Just finished up another painting and am loving the colors. There’s something about stringed classical instruments that feels luxurious. They’re all Mozart-y and shit. I kind of wish I had learned to play the violin or the cello in middle school and high school instead of the flute. I hate the flute. It’s all flute-y and shit. Anyway, all of that is irrelevant, except that it’s not because it totally pertains to the new painting:

Violin.JPG

Violin 12″ x 12″ oil on board $375

Original for sale at http://shop.emilypageart.com/t/realist-works

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Mondays With Muddy

24 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, music, Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, cello, journal, Landscape with Figures, Mondays with Muddy, music, piano, unpublished manuscript

This is the next installment of my grandmother’s unpublished manuscript. Beatrice Allen Page’s Landscape With Figures:

“I’ve had occasional glimpses of the Rosenblums sitting on their porch or out in their yard, but apparently they don’t care for swimming and beach-sitting and prefer to stay quietly by themselves. So we’d never met. As I was walking past their house late this morning, however, Mrs. R was just coming out. Even now, a trace of real beauty lurks behind the overlay of heavy make-up and dyed black hair, and there is a faint suggestion of a kind of queenliness in her carriage in spite of the lumpy figure stretch the too-tight dress.

Impulsively I stopped, introduced myself, and told her how much I’ve enjoyed her husband’s cello playing.

She gave me a searching, suspicious, even slightly hostile look which took me aback. Then abruptly she changed, having apparently decided I meant what I said and was not just gushing. Her face took on a glow of warm responsiveness and in a rather deep and slightly raspy voice that was not unattractive, she insisted upon my coming in to meet her husband, promptly abandoning whatever plans she may have had in mind when she came out.

I spent a delightful hour with them, in the course of which I gathered certain facts. He is a cardiologist and what he called a ‘prevented’ cellist, meaning I suppose that he never considered himself good enough to become a professional musician.

‘I’m like Chekhov,’ he explained happily. ‘I have both a wife and a mistress. Medicine is my wife and music is my mistress.’ He talks in a slightly  hesitant way with an accent, and the enlarged eyes behind the thick glasses look at you with gentleness and humor.

‘It is a good in-stru-ment,’ he said, patting the cello lovingly. ‘Good enough for me. It sounds. But sometimes I dare allow myself to imagine it is a Stradivarius. And I, I am Piatigorsky, or sometimes Casals.’

His wife laughed appreciatively although she has undoubtedly heard his little jokes dozens of times. She was once a professional pianist. There were autographed photographs – lares and penates that accompany them everywhere, I suspect – of Toscanini, Horowitz and other musical greats, ranged about on tables, but I could not get close enough to any of them to read the inscription and find out what her name had been. I had a feeling she did not want to reveal it, that she preferred to close off the past from the present. Arthritis in her hands put a stop to her career, which perhaps accounts for the slightly bitter cast of her mouth.

‘But she plays accom-pan-i-ments for me sometimes,’ Dr. R said, bestowing an affectionate look on her.

Their muual pride and joy is their son who is a violinist and currently hoping to land a job with one of the major symphony orchestras. They clearly have great expectations for him.

‘He has a good tone,’ said Dr. R. ‘Full, bi-i-g’ He drew the word out so it sounded almost like ‘beeg’ and opened his arms out in a wide, circular movement. ‘Everything is bi-i-g, full, round. Rococo.’ I doubt if that was the word he meant; I think it just sounded as if it should be. Then as if he were anxious not to brag too brazenly, he added, ‘But the lit-tle things, I tell him the get ground under.’ He twisted his heel into the rug to demonstrate. Nevertheless, when he raised his head, his homely face was alight with the pride he could not conceal.

‘Sometimes he and my husband play duets together,’ Mrs. R said, and added simply, ‘It is beautiful to hear.”

In St. Louis Dr. R plays in an amateur chamber music group. His medical practice keeps him so busy, however, that he has little time to practice the cello. ‘But,’ he says, ‘I play ev-er-y day. No matter how I feel. Even if only for three minutes. One must nev-er miss a sing-le day.’

To see that kind of loving enthusiasm and discipline, particularly without hope of recognition for one’s talent, always makes me feel good. I don’t see it very often. It has made my day.”

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Mondays With Muddy

08 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, music, Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, cello, journaling, Landscape with Figures, music, unpublished manuscript, writing

This is the next excerpt from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“I hear that the doctor from St. Louis – Rosenblum is his name – is himself the one who plays the cello. It must be more than a casual avocation with him because he takes it so seriously. I can set my clock by him. He begins his practicing promptly at eight o’clock and continues until ten o’clock. He works another two hours from three to five.

I find myself listening eagerly for those first tentative strokes of the bow across the strings as if he were apprehensive of releasing disharmony, as perhaps he is. Once the instrument is tuned and the danger is past, there follows a moment of silence which makes me think of the brief, suspenseful pause after the conductor raises his baton, a focusing of every ounce of energy and attention. Then the first note sounds as he beings his technical exercises, slowly at first and it seems to me cautiously (but not timidly) and tenderly like a man beginning to make love to a very shy girl. Tempo and confidence increase, however, as the ‘girl’ becomes more responsive.

After an hour spent on technique, he begins working on repertoire. Not being knowledgeable about music, I seldom recognize the composer, let alone the composition, but that doesn’t detract from the cello’s eloquence. Sometimes the notes tumble forth with a bubbling vivacity as if the instrument were laughing. Sometimes they are torn out in anguish, deep and somber, as if it were trying to restrain sobs. It protests, it rages, it rejoices, it consoles. And occasionally it sounds full of self-doubts and questionings without hope of ever finding the answers.

Even when he plays the same phrase over and over in an effort to get it just right, it never gets on my nerves. I like that striving for perfection that characterizes the real artists – the way, for instance, a conductor rehearses his men over and over on one passage until he has ‘moulded’ it to his complete satisfaction.

I suddenly recall that lovely young harpist (I wonder why harpists are usually women and almost always beautiful) from the Indianapolis Symphony years ago telling me how she could not get the exact nuance the conductor wanted in one phrase, and how she went home and thought about it and thought about it until she could hear and feel inside herself the precise way it was meant to be. When she played it at the performance – and here, in telling me about it, she made a very delicate semicircular motion with one hand, a motion that carried through her shoulders and neck and head with a barely perceptible undulation – when she played it at the performance, she and the conductor exchanged  fleeting glance that said: ‘That was it.’

…Later. Had my first glimpse of the doctor half an hour ago over in the fish market. I heard someone say ‘Dr. Rosenblum’ and I looked up quickly. He was just leaving and I had only a glimpse of a rather short, stocky man with an abundance of iron-gray hair and brown eyes magnified behind thick lenses.”

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Emily Page

Emily Page

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