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The "Silence" series, in which lone abstracted figures punctuate hazy expanses, is among M.P. Landis's best-known bodies of work. This recent series is anything but silent -- in both origin and ultimate mien. Painted during a springtime East Coast tour with the revolutionary Jump Arts collective, the works in Landis's first solo show at the Schoolhouse are vibrant records of the responses of one artist (in the company of a poet and three dancers) to nine avant-garde jazz musicians including the likes of Daniel Carter and Sabir Mateen.

 

Landis has been a devoted follower of jazz - particularly improvisational jazz - for well over a decade. His WOMR program "Bird Calls" ran from 1991-1996, the year he moved from Provincetown to New York in search of a more varied aural palette. Landis had long been painting to a soundtrack; on meeting Tom Abbs, bassist, tuba-player, and founder of the non-profit Jump Arts, he started collaborating with musicians, painting while they played. The "live painting" enacted on the seven-stop Jump Arts American Road Project is Landis's most extensive collaboration to date.

 

On any given night, while the musicians did their thing with the horns, drums, strings, and keyboards, Landis did his with paint, china markers, oil pastels, and charcoal, all applied to two large boards, each stapled with a dozen or so variously sized sheets of paper. (Landis likens the multiple surfaces to the many parts of a song.) Add to music and paint a third element -- the audience -- and here's where it got interesting. "Standing on a stage is not especially comfortable for me, but it's that tension I'm intrigued by," says Landis. "I couldn't do it without letting the music take over."

 

Onstage, Landis's focus on his "canvases" is constant and absolute. (This for several hours at a stretch.) "In a sense I'm trying to capture the music," Landis says, "and every time it changes -- which is all the time -- I have to react. Often I have to decide whether to take the time to describe a moment that's just passed or instead let go." This "forced spontaneity" is just one distinguishing demand of live painting. With it comes the primacy of instinct over intellect. And then there's the reduction of materials to what's on hand and nothing more.

 

From this deep relationship with music, the impulse of the moment, and limited means to an end, has sprung a series of paintings that, while rife with the vitality of the dynamic process that spawned them, feel extraordinarily resolved. The marks (brushy strokes; agitated lines; obliterating washes) reveal the gestures (arm sweeps, pressing fingers; circling palms) that we imagine reflect the music (sonic swells?; staccato horn blasts?; rolling bass?). But this is not a direct translation, not a synesthetic exercise. It's improvisation, that delicate balance of constraint and freedom that leads to beauty.

 

Jennifer Liese

 

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