Keira McArthur

Although I can’t see it through the opaque winter sky I can feel it:  the moon is full. With the able help of cellists Carol Mulder and Sibylle Ruppert my excellent mom and I performed David Popper’s Requiem for three celli and piano for our Industrial Ancestors yesterday evening.  Folk came out to witness as […]

We were in my studio where almost every inch of wall, floor table and shelf is crammed with stuff in process and use, with tools, & paint & vine charcoal & buttons & books & thread & blank paper & other paper covered with notes or ideas or solo, duet, trio, quartet or orchestral music.  […]

Interesting, isn’t it, that we divide ‘commercial’ music from ‘real’ music?  When in fact all music is consumed, and all professional musicians are in the business of earning a living – no matter what genre they play in.  We say to our kids – no don’t be a musician, you’ll never make it, it’s too […]

The morning is still still and grey weighed down by two feet of spring snow.  Even the sky is heavy.  The birds do their best to lighten things up but we have no warm welcome for them this year after the long flight north.  Just heavy grey, heavy snow, covered in old rabbit tracks. It […]

… but not yet in depth, about these paintings, this exhibition project.  If my mind were a light table, it would be stacked with disparate ideas superimposed one over the other  – I’m squinting to see what composite images appear from behind and through – negative and positive. A sample from the stack: the distorted […]

My desk is in a new place – not sure I like it yet. To my right, a pile of ash and cherry lumber, drywall, moor vents, a roll of typar, a garbage bag full of roxyl & strips of R20 styrofoam.  A rolled-up rug, boxes of Christmas decorations from 2 years ago. To my […]

It’s a mighty fine tunnel we’ve just got through. A storm on Saturn in 2011. This already happened, and now we see it. Why do I find that comforting? I am later in the day after the day of find my head get to town rehearse find-a-piano rehearse perform rehearse perform perform so-grateful-for-good-friends enriched pleased […]

Our covenant with Winter:  that there will be space and time to contemplate, to examine and re-examine,  to be still.  In the rich pianissimo of deep snow, quiet things sing their subtlety, small things hold great significance, and you can see the wind. I cannot imagine a life without this. I awake with the phone […]

I find it’s most difficult these days to be truly still and resoundingly empty like a huge stone bowl on a plinth.  I’m getting better at it, but it’s taking a considerable amount of focus. I seek to do this now because it occurred to me many months ago (years, even) that I need more […]

We hit the road a week ago yesterday for London Ontario for a quickie overnight visit.  This was the fulfillment of an idea that we should mark the last week that my niece would live in Canada before she left on an extended Rotary trip to Germany.  We did so –   there are new […]

There are good things happening here in my hometown. Last night the streets were full of us as we venue-hopped through the downtown core to see a large and motley crew of excellent musicians & performers in the 3rd year of Otherfolk.  This happens twice a year – February’s Lupercalia has the same marvelous effect […]

…if the nose & claw of a big hammer could be hung from the ceiling of the space so that it seemed as though it was coming through the building to hit a giant nail embedded in the floor….. … if one section of the installation was a series of small paintings all connected by […]