Artist’s Corner: Kevin Baldwin

From Issue 91 — Of The Earth

Recollection, Study No. 8

A Musical score requires immense focus and understanding. Practicing and bringing the notational language to life changes daily as you uncover new ways of weaving together lines, gestures, and structures. In the Recollection series, I interpret the black acrylic notation using charcoal, metal powders, and acrylic. Each day new possibilities arise, and the charcoal and powders remain malleable; the medium allows alterations in gesture and layers, or even be removed. This process highlights the beauty inside this raw and imperfect process.

After the work is completed, the work will always be in a constant state of performance. The metal powders placed into the work will oxidize over the years. The work, how it existed yesterday, is not the exact work you see today. Rust, patina, and tarnish highlight the passing of time as the painting never stops performing, leaving on a recollection of what the work was.

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GIALOGY: The Science of Me. A New Medium. A Rebellion.

I'm lost. Waiting to be found. Or you may say... discovered. Just like everything in this City of Angels. LA doesn’t hide its soul—it seduces you with it, glimmering just under the sun-soaked surface. The contrasts here aren’t loud like in New York. They’re quieter, stranger. In New York, the skyline tells you who’s winning and who’s barely hanging on. In LA, the contrast is subtler—between palm trees and parking garages, between fame and anonymity, between an owl on a Beverly Hills sidewalk at midnight and a billboard screaming a new face you'll forget by fall.

Artist’s Corner – Kevin Baldwin: Composition No. 10

The score of a musical work is fascinating. As a composer, I spend hundreds of hours alone with a score to unearth and present the uniqueness of every sound. I consider the physicality of a sound, both in the depth of overtones and frequencies and in the most mi-nuscule human motions it takes to produce them. I consider texture, the harsh and grinding color of the cellist utilizing over-pressured bowing, and the intimate fragility of the flautist's unstable multi-phonic. I consider shape, from violent rhythmic gestures to light, lyrical flurries. I consider, how variations larger blocks made up of colors, texutres, layers, and rhythms work together to highlight every unique aspect of a sound. I consider the weight of each and every observance I make, and I ensure every mark in the score best reveals the essence of a sound.

Reinvention in the Third Act

Paola Yamel Lima will tell you she didn't invent herself. "I didn't invent this person," she says. "I was there." The circumstances just needed to get out of the way. For a long time, the circumstances did not get out of the way. She is a mother, a partner, the person who kept everything running – the chef, the driver, the emotional anchor. Eastern European parents who steered their kids toward law and medicine. A domestic life so complete it barely left room to notice what else was underneath. And then a relationship that worked to erase what remained. She describes it without drama: “I was almost deleted.” That's what a person with that kind of pathology does to a partner — someone so full of vibrancy and life, of course, they want to squash it. "I was raised to be pretty," she says. "Here we are."

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