John Cage: New River Watercolors

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John Cage New River Watercolors

• John Cage conducted watercolor painting workshops
  at the Mountain Lake Workshop in 1983, 1988, 1989
  1990

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• John Cages first visited Mountain Lake Workshop
  in Spring, 1983, to conduct a micological foray
  (mushroom hunting) with Dr. Orson Miller. During
  the workshop he visited a site on the New River
  with extraordinary river stones

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Ryoanji and Ripplemeade

• The next image is of the Rustic garden of
  unkempt and loosely distributed rocks and stones
  behind the more famous Dry Garden at Ryoanji,
  Kyoto. It is well-known to many admirers of
  Japans great gardens - but relatively unknown to
  foreign visitors.

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Ripplemeade, on the New River, In The Appalachian
region of Virginia

• The vast array of river stones along the bend in
  the New River at Ripplemeade is the site where
  Cage selected the stones in 1983 which he later
  used in creating his New River Watercolors.

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Cage selected more than 200 stones from the New
River
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Cage began his watercolor project in 1983 -

• On the final day of his visit to the Mountain
  Lake Workshop Micological foray, Cage visited
  Kass studio, which had been prepared with
  properly arranged materials, for a watercolor
  painting experiment.
• Using his I-ching computer programs, Cage made
  several preliminary studies and completed on
  finished painting during this session. But,
  although he wanted to pursue painting
  watercolors, it would be five years before his
  schedule would permit him to return to create the
  first significant group of New River
  Watercolors.

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Cages first complete painting -1983
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Feathers

• One of the remarkable choices that Cage made in
  1988 was to use feathers - instead of brushes, to
  paint the first three of the four series of
  watercolors that he created at the Mountain Lake
  Workshop in 1988.

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The River Stones

• The stones selected from the Ripplemeade site
  were arranged in three groups small, medium and
  large, and a masking tape label was placed on
  each stone to establish its group, number and
  placement orientation. This is a selection from
  the group of larger stones.

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Creating Scores, or Programs, for the New River
Watercolors

• Once the choices were made - which involved the
  materials that the art works were to be made
  with, every group of watercolors required scores,
  or programs, that were detailed plans for each
  painting that were derived from the computer
  program of the 64 hexagrams of the I-Ching. The
  brushes, rocks and their placement on the paper,
  color mixtures, and particular papers were all
  submitted to selection by Cages use of chance
  operations.

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Brushes and Feathers

• A large selection of every kind of brush, and
  many feathers, were also separated into groups
  and labeled in order to be submitted to be
  accessed by chance operations by consulting the
  I-Ching computer program.

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Watercolors

• The list of watercolors, each numbered, were
  blended in proportions of approximately 10 to
  create the particular color used in the
  watercolors. All colors were chance determined
  combinations.

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New River Watercolors Series I, 1988

• Series I
• The I-Ching was used to select the paper, a group
  of five sheets of parchment. Cage used chance to
  select the rocks to be used in the work,
  determine their placement on the sheets, and the
  mixtures of colors, to create five paintings. He
  painted around the rock contours with feathers. A
  wide brush made in the workshop was used for the
  washes - which were also determined by chance
  operations.

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Examples of feather brushes

• Many types of feathers were prepared before the
  workshop - but the glide feathers dropped by
  guinea fowl, and
• Pheasant wings, recycled from the School of
  Poultry Science at Virginia Tech, were selected
  because of their resilience and strength. Cage
  had a feather brush that had been given to him
  by San Francisco artist, Thomas Marioni we could
  not find out what it was or where it was from. In
  1997 I found one in Japan it was an instrument
  used to clear charcoal detritus in the
  preparation of boiling water for the formal tea
  ceremony.

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Series II, 1988

• Series II, 1988
• The I-Ching was used to select a roll of paper,
  and then determined that it would be cut into 12
  sheets, each 26 X 72 inches. Again, feathers were
  used to paint around the contours of the river
  stones placed on the sheets - all of these
  elements, as well as the size and location of the
  washes, were determined by I-Ching chance
  operations.

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Series III, 1988

• Series III, 1988
• The I-Ching was used to select a roll of paper,
  and then determined that it would be cut into 20
  sheets, each 36 X 12 inches. Again, feathers were
  used to paint around the contours of a single
  river stone placed on the same position near the
  bottom of the paper - his decision was Cages
  choice and was based on an image that occurred
  to him in a dream that he had the night before.
  Chance determined the placement rock image -
  and the stone could wander right and left - and
  on and off the paper. After completing the
  painting of the rock contours - he applied washes
  of various dimensions with stiff sweeping brush,
  both brush and washes were selected by chance.

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• Series IV, 1988
• The I-Ching selected 8 sheets of cold press
  paper. Cage used brushes for the first time to
  paint around the contours of the river stones
  placed on the sheets.
• The I-Ching determined that the first painting in
  the group would include more than 200 painting
  moves this work took more than eight hours to
  complete. Seven more paintings comprising the
  series were completed the next day. Three
  additional experimental paintings were made from
  the score for 4 in this series these
  demonstrated the remarkably wide variety of
  effect of the application of brush and paint.

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STEPS- 1989

• Cage painted the performance piece entitled
  STEPS at the Mountain Lake Workshop in 1989.
  The workshop had prepared a group of very wide
  brushes and special mixing troughs for him. The
  painting is made by walking or moving backwards
  dragging a big brush soaked in a wash over the
  ink impressions of the artists tracks. Cage
  associated this painting with his collaboration
  with Robert Rauschenberg in 1951, Automobile Tire
  Print, in which he drove a Model A Ford with ink
  applied to one tire over a great length of paper
  while Rauschenberg guided him to stay on the
  paper.
• Robert Rauschenberg, Automobile Tire Print,
  1951, 16.5 X 264.5 in. ink on 20 connected piece
  of paper.

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River Rocks and Smoke, 1990

• In preparation for his 1990 workshop, Cage asked
  for us to attempt to apply smoke to paper. Many
  techniques were used to create the effect,
  acetylene gas, burning papers, weeds, sticks,
  steel wool, hay, and finally and most effective,
  straw. Many sheets of various sizes and types of
  paper were prepared before his arrival and during
  his week-long workshop.

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The first Smokes - Four Archival Paintings

• Cage experimented with smoked effect on the
  paper, and the chance determined vertical
  division in which aspects of the rock images
  might appear, by making four paintings in which
  the divisions received watercolor washes
  applied over the smoke and watercolor rock
  contours. Two scores were used in four works in
  which two were smoked before receiving the
  color washes, and two were smoked after the
  washes were applied.
• On the basis of these experiments, Cage decided
  not to apply washes over the vertical divisions
  in the following series of paintings - and thus
  left them invisible in the compositions.
• NoteThese works are signed by Cage - but he
  determined that they should be considered
  preliminary experiments, and archival studies.

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