Ripples of a Blue Girls Tears

"Ripples of a Blue Girls Tears"
It's Big! The final version will probably be done as a tryptych so I can get the 2m width I am looking for.

I have started a seperate page for this project with the full information and moved the background research there.

This is my first foray into interpreting great pieces of music, music which stirs my deepest emotions, then turning them into a woven piece. This is the main direction for my work and what a journey this piece is taking me on!

Music is, for me, the highest art form - the ultimate emotional journey. Listen to this; if you are over 45 and it doesn't stir you, check your pulse...you're probably already dead!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU2gHmpghx0&feature=related

That is one of my favourite songs, and certainly my favourite lyric; "Ripples", written by Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford. I know the lyrics inside out and it doesn't require a literature degree to work out their meaning; it's about youth, it's optimism, it's beauty, the inevitability of ageing and the futility of chasing what has passed us by. However, it was only when I stumbled on the link between this and the poem "Blue Girls", written 50 years before "Ripples" by John Crowe Ransom, that the image for my weaving really materialised. To my knowledge, Banks & Rutherford have never acknowledged that "Blue Girls" inspired their lyrics; though if you read both (they are reproduced on the seperate project page "Ripples of a Blue Girls Tears"), it's inconcievable that this is not the case.


My piece, "Ripples of a Blue Girl's Tears" represents the Blue Girls through colour and shape, and I have chosen to reflect the melencholy mood of the song and poem also through the colour. The image itself represent the ripples and interference patterns created from tears falling onto a pool of water; tears of the Blue Girls looking upon their reflection in the pool "Seems not very long ago, Lovelier she was than any that I know" then seeing the distorted face reflected back at them "The face in the water looks up, And she shakes her head as if to say, That it's the last time you'll look like today." Dozens of hours have been spent taking the basic overshot pattern for the concentric waves step-wise to the final draft, manipulating the patterns to destroy the symmetry, yet replicate the interference patterns when ripples collide, then arranging these to give the semblence of a facial image in the distorted surface - just hope others can see it too LOL :-)
The final stage was to create the distorted body images of the blue girls - something that I had to do with the liftplan-only, as to change the threading would have undone the main ripples image.

"Blue Girls" is considered to be the pinacle of his work, from an American poet who is considered to be one of the most influential of his time. The lyrics of Ripples are beautiful; the whole is sublime; read and listen and hopefully the two will come together for you in my design.

Mike
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