"Joanna Hearing Music"

"Joanna Hearing Music" (2021)

 

My continuing efforts to "get my hand back" - I'm  pleased with this painting, as it has been in my mind for a long time.  I wanted to make a painting to honor my friend the Composer  Joanna Brouk, who passed away in 2017.  She used to tell me that she "heard the music" first, and often her composing happened afterwards.  She was one of the most extraordinary and brilliant people I have ever known, and hardly a day goes by that I don't miss her.  

Wherever you are, Joanna, I hope you like this painting.

"I still see shapes when I hear music

It was never my desire to be “out there”

It was just my joy to do it

I hear music still

I write every day.

The writing and the music come from the same place.

There’s a lot of stuff coming through still

Last night I was awoken by Goddess dreams

And that happens a lot."

Joanna Brouk 

as told to Douglas Mcgowan, August, 2015

Carlsbad Botanical Gardens.........

"Dragon Tree Deva" (2014)

The Botanical Garden at Carlsbad

Where I found, some 5 years ago, some  very sexy flowers, Agaves with Attitude, and quite a few exotic Devas of the Garden........... 

No matter how I wish, I find I just can't write lately.  No new revelations come, other than it is so very important to notice the Beauty.  With a capital "B".   So my  mind, keeps going backwards.  I visited the Botanical Garden with my friend Joanna Brouk, and made these photos for her.  Joanna and I went to Berkeley together, and she was a poet, a novelist, and best known as an early, and influencial, composer of synthesizer music. So much of her music came from the magical beings she sensed in nature, the Undines and the Dryads.   She died  suddenly in 2016, and I so often find myself missing her.  As I approach my 7th decade, so much memory, and a lot of loneliness and loss  too.  Here is for Joanna, once again.

Joanna Brouk - Farewell to a Friend

I just lost my oldest friend, the composer, poet and writer Joanna Brouk. We were young artists in the halcyon years of Berkeley, and her art has travelled with me across the years. Joanna was one of the early composers of synthesizer music, and she worked at Mills College and the University of California in the early 70's, and she was one the early collaborators of the Hearts of Space radio show. I remember her "Gong Piece", a beautiful work using a Japanese gong.........I had a copy of it on reel to reel tape, and carried that around for years until it finally disintegrated.   She and I and another friend, Felicia, collaborated on a book of poems,  and it was my delight to reconnect with Joanna many years later, in 2011.

Since then we've visited several times a year, and I've watched Joanna's music be re-discovered (she was invited to perform in France this Spring), as well as she was finally ready to release the first edition of her "Lost Eros" books, a project she was excited about.  Creativity was flowing for Joanna, it was my privilege to experience her inspiration and enthusiasm,  and it seems impossible that that conversation is suddenly not to be continued.  But what I find I remember best.......the two of us just sitting on the beach,  watching the pelicans come home. Or watching movies with popcorn.  Or working on her garden, hauling humongous bricks around.  I remember she had a bee hive in a tree, and I was planning on visiting in the summer, to see how the garden was coming along with the new improvements.  

"Joanna Hearing Music" 

In  a recent release of one of her albums I heard the sound of a woman's voice singing - and suddenly remembered that was me, singing at the bottom of the stairwell at Kroeber Hall, while she recorded me, 45 years ago. The last time I saw her she visited me in February for the Gem show, and was excited about going to France for a concert. We talked about the book she was working on, how weird it was to be growing old. We were sure we had more adventures ahead......

I remember Joanna used to say that she just "heard the music of the spheres" and she did strange abstract drawings trying to "write down" what she heard. In many ways her music was an effort to re-member that music that was already there. The same with her poems, which she said were more about "the space in-between than the actual words". She's fine, I know, but I feel grief for her son. And for me. Grief is always really about us, the ones who are left behind.

 I don't know how to honor her except to share a bit of what she contributed to the world, the world she was a true artist in:   a pollinator of souls.

light
light
light of morning
the fairest light, the fairest light
has come

softly, I feel its coming


night has given
night has given
a place to morning
breath returns and moistens
the grass the birds feather


no longer do I hide
no longer do I hide
gone into darkness


light has come

Joanna Brouk (1972)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDy1dDijsIs&t=25s

Joanna Brouk - Hearing Music

Joanna and I  met as students at U.C. Berkeley in the halcyon years of protest, New Age, and just being young artists in an exciting time in our lives. I created a series of drawings for Joanna and my other friend Felicia, in a collaboration we did to create a book of poetry. I lost touch with Joanna and Felicia, but I put their poems up on my website.  In 2008 I was contacted by Felicia, and spent time with her before she passed away in 2010.  Not too long after that Joanna and I reconnected, and we've been friends again ever since.  

She was one of the early composers of synthesizer music.  I remember a beautiful piece she performed for Hearts of Space using a Tibetan gong....for years I played it on an old tape until it finally stopped working.  I also remember standing in the stairwell of Kroeber Hall, where the art and anthro departments at U.C. B. was, while Joanna recorded me singing to the echoes of the building.  It ended up in a piece of music, and it was ghostly to hear my  own voice from so long ago within the album. 

I was delighted to learn that Joanna's music has been re-released, and she will be doing concerts again, among them in Paris this summer.


https://youtu.be/CDy1dDijsIs

Joanna Brouk found!

light
light

light of morning
the fairest light, the fairest light
has come

softly, I feel its coming

night has given
night has given
a place to morning
breath returns and moistens
the grass the birds feather

no longer do I hide
no longer do I hide
gone into darkness

light has come

Back in 2004, I found a collection of poems and forgotten artwork, from the halcyon days of Berkeley in the early 70's.  The art and the poems were from a collaboration between myself, and two of my friends, Felicia Miller and Joanna Brouk.  I published them in my website, and in 2006, Felicia found me, and our friendship resumed after 30 some years.  I went to visit her in Puerto Rico, and saw in Washington D.C.  as well.  Felicia passed from this world in January of last year.  

 
A few weeks ago, the other long lost friend, Joanna, wrote to me!  As it turns out, Joanna lives in a town near San Diego, and we've since spent several wonderful days together.  Wow, almost 35 years have passed..........and yet, it's still Joanna!  Interestingly, because of my posting her poetry on my website, she was contacted by someone who is re-issuing and archiving some of her music from those early days, including work that was presented on the "Hearts of Space" program in Berkeley.


Joanna is a composer, and a writer........funny, like Felicia, she had forgotten all about the poems I treasured, and I'm delighted to re-offer them to her.  I still love her series of poems that I illustrated so very long ago (the series can be found at the link below).   In them,  Joanna moves, like a stream, through the rythems of season, current, night and day, to an ecstatic experience of  the Sun's return.

And here is a link to Joanna's music, from a KPFA broadcast ("Hearts of Space") in 1972.

http://www.archive.org/details/OTG_1972_10_25_2

I thank Spider Woman for weaving our lives together once again.