I have always been interested in the fine arts and, being an opera composer, I am frequently involved in collaboration with other artists. So my intention is to feature artists from many different disciplines here in this blog, as I encounter them in the course of my travels, or as they encounter me in the course of theirs!

It is a  pleasure to introduce, on this new website  my first ever Blog posting, in the form of a video interview with the American artist Rebecca Cross. Having known her for many years, I have always been thrilled in each encounter to admire the output of her continuing evolution as an artist. In recent years there has been a major transformation in the nature of her creative interests, concerned now with surface and sculpture using different kinds of fibre, and drawing on techniques from many diverse cultures. Amongst the techniques that Rebecca talks about in this interview is the Japanese art of Shibori, the method of folding, pleating and dying fabric.

Rebecca is married to the composer Randolph Coleman (to be featured in a future blog), who has used chance procedures prolifically in his works. Not surprisingly Rebecca is also interested in chance and indeterminancy and talks about how these have influenced the way she works with fibre and fashions images.  I found the work method fascinating to watch, and rather analogous to a composer’s use of chance, as with the classic procedure of throwing dice.