UPCOMING GALLERY EVENTS:

• Thursday, September 21, 8:30 a.m. morning coffee Queen’s Suite talk with Michael Weil

• Thursday, September 28, 5:30 p.m. cocktail Queen’s Suite photography chat

Teddy stopped into the gallery yesterday. At 87, he elegantly carries worldly experience and delivers it through large, teal-ringed-black pupils. Generous as his way, he tells me that my work reminds him of a line in a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem that was his mother’s favorite. Then he looks into me and recites:

“Of eyes whose vision saw the same. And freely granted beauty's claim. Where others found but worthless wastes.”

I am fulfilled.

On an earlier visit, Teddy allowed me to play for him a recording by Edward “Duke” Ellington, “The Queen’s Suite,” which was my inspiration for these photographs. Teddy listened intently, patiently, despite being in the midst of his route. I felt so privileged to share this music with him. He is close to the age my father would be now. They aren’t much alike, and they would have so enjoyed each other’s company.

My father, a casual pianist (and photographer), loved Ellington’s music, so as a child I secured an emotional appreciation for Duke’s genius. I did not know that, in 1959, a 60-year-old Ellington composed six songs inspired by his meeting with the young monarch, Queen Elizabeth. He shared these compositions with just one person, the Queen, by way of a gold-pressed disc.

September last, Meredith and I were vacationing in a charming Cape Cod cottage—a structure that predates the Queen, the Duke, the birth of jazz and the United States itself. Sitting on the screened porch, I learned that the long-lived British monarch had passed, and I came across an article about “The Queen’s Suite.” Instantly (shout out to on-demand streaming), I was introduced to a piece of Ellington music I had never heard. And as from the sight of the northern lights, I was awash in utter appreciation and amazement. The suites are rich with the mesmerizing sway, colors, and bewildering beauty of the aurora borealis.

In that moment, I felt the urge to make photographs--there on the pitted and textured green floorboards of that Truro porch. Why I pictured Weston’s studies of green peppers, I am not certain. I thought of a simple bowl and imagined a gnarled rock the size of a pepper placed in it beneath the screen-filtered Cape light. I found a worn wooden bowl on the kitchen shelf. As we walked the shoreline of Longnook beach, I gathered a few of many distinct rocks. Some scallop shells appeared eager to be part of the performance, and a single shorebird feather fell into my sight. Back at the house, I recommissioned an egg slicer that had the rhythmic lines and shadows of the shells and the broken strings of a neglected instrument. Didn't Ansel Adams photograph an egg slicer? Did Weston? Yes! Or Man Ray? An egg and a shell. I was on my way.

Here, then, is my suite of photographs inspired by masters I so admire and illuminated by a jazz monarch's musical gift to a queen. Straight, infused with mediated sunlight that I hope freely grants beauty’s claim and gives life to the still.

- Michael Weil, August 2023