Over het werk
ACCORDION BOOK CANON OF THE CANYON, WATERCOLOUR WITH MUSIC , Rita van der Kant-Klomp, ©2020 Print to be ordered by mail (8 pages, printed on two sides in folder 16X24 cm) for €35 plus postage.Between the beginning and the end of a piece of music (in this case the Canon in D of Pachelbel from the seventeenth century) the time is moving (horizontal). The music’s times are moving horizontal over six pages of the accordion book.
The music can be performed through the centuries, in a new arrangement, (©Dick Klomp) with additional words, in (four) different languages (© Rita), with different instruments, at a different pace, with other musicians. But the accord, the sound and the word of this moment, is the only thing I am able to perceive. At this moment I hear all participant parties (vertical)
When I am looking at a painting, my eyes perceive the illusion of an object or an arrangement, because I see the light, which is reflected at this very moment (vertical). What I see is the paining’s paper or canvas surface, upon which the pigment determines which light waves are being reflected and what colour and intensity can be seen. (A watercolour painting’s paper is white and has a texture; the pigments, having been soaked by the paper, are more or less transparent.) When I move my eyes over the surface, that takes time (horizontal). I am seeing new waves all the time. (This is most apparent when a cloud comes and covers the sun, or a lamp that illuminates one part of the painting more than another. Like in a movie).
Meister Eckhart (13e eeuw): “It is the Time that prevents us from seeing the light. There is no bigger obstacle between us and God.”
La Plage des Templiers, Naturist camp site in the Ardèche, summer 2017
Every morning when I was swimming a new insight came to me, with a dawning apprehension that could be expressed in two words. These were astonishingly simple insights, inspired by mostly literally remembered words from the Bible. I was deeply moved when, near the source where I landed every morning to touch the cold water and drink some of it, I fully accepted the meaning of ‘I Am’. I remembered a story from the Bible, in which we were told that God’s name means ‘I am who I am’. Although, it is no name and cannot be expressed in language. It is Understanding, Feeling deeply, we are it all together and everyone is it. The idea was born to write new words to the music of the Canon of Pachelbel, instead of the ever repeated Hallelujah. The words were found during that summer, flashed upon me and inspired by swimming in the Ardèche. In the autumn thereafter I asked my brother to arrange the music in three choral voices, to fit to the words in four languages.
The watercolour painting’s story starts on the right side of the accordion book. It is my perception of the early morning, when the first sun beams illuminate and give glow to the water of the Pastière, a rapid. That bright light, the bubbling fresh water in which I let my body sink and the current that takes me to the source. Now Is, I Now, I Am, Now Me, is the Mother, the Earth, the origin of all life, who was sitting there all the time until I understood. I Am, that Mother, Gaia. Then You; the Angel of the Ardèche, high up there on the cliffs, will watch over you who will come like he did over me, all those mornings and afternoons I was swimming there and saw your reflection on the water, joining the blue sky, the white to mauve cliffs, the green and the shimmering of the sunlight on the waves that throw a pattern of continuing restless motion in the rock-face’s shadows. Nothing is static, not the Now in any case. Then They: Under the Falaise, an inclined rock, the air bubbles are floating, complete planetary systems in immense universes, that explode and are born again. I watch them, swimming, with my head mirrored in the bubbles. I feel the water pulling on my body and I feel that I am alive, at the same instant, in the immense universe between the other bubbles, bubbling up and exploding. Are We, the reflection of the cliffs in the water. High up on that cliff is a lookout, a balcony, where the tourists look down on the meander of the Ardèche. The river nearly touches herself, half an X. Sometimes we are the tourist too, the spectators, but Now we are present in the meander, the Me (X, pronounced Iks is Dutch make-do plural for both Me and X) , the IKS ∞. I arrive at the next rapid and look behind me. The rock-face I now see is the right bank near where I was swimming a moment ago, but also the right bank farther downstream, around the curve of the meander. If I happened to swim further, I would pass the same rock another time. Now Is: I walk back to start all over the next morning. Then: In the middle of the force of the rapid of the Pastière is a silent pond, in the counter current; the thoughts remain over there. The I goes with the flow into the light! At the source I hear the trickling water when I return to listen more attentively.
(reading right to left)
THE X (ME), ARE WE, THEN THEY, THEN YOU, NOW ME, I AM, I NOW, NOW IS