When the Beat visual artist Jay DeFeo first started her renowned work The Rose, she thought of it only as “idea that had a centre to it.” The painting was soon nine feet tall and seven wide, though DeFeo was not done yet. Rather, she moved it to a bigger canvas which stood in the bay windows of her apartment’s living room. “[DeFeo] continued to work on The Rose for the next seven years, applying thick paint, then chiselling it away,” explain notes from The Whitney Museum of American Art. “Now nearly eleven feet tall and weighing almost a ton, the work’s dense, multi-layered surface became, in DeFeo’s words, ‘a marriage between painting and sculpture’.” In allowing one piece of art to occupy both her attention and physical space for so long, DeFeo also achieved a marriage between art and life.
The Rose was at the San Francisco Art Institute when Young Moon’s Trevor Montgomery was a student there, albeit covered with plaster to bolster the canvas and stored behind the wall of a conference room. But be it the legend around the painting or some strange aura imbued within the work itself, something of DeFeo’s creation found its way into Montgomery’s head. Now, years later, the work comes to mind for Montgomery when reflecting on the new Young Moon album, Triggered by Sunsets.
After the loss of a close friend, Montgomery left San Francisco for New Zealand, only to land in his new home just as the pandemic was beginning. Cut off from the community he’d been hoping to join, he instead constructed a studio within an old Masonic temple and focused solely on creating new songs. His own marriage between art and life which resulted in a record, Triggered by Sunsets. The parallels to DeFeo go further. Both works offer a deep appreciation of the natural world via materials seemingly at odds with the organic plane (The Rose uses oil and mica, Young Moon digital synths). And just as DeFeo fashioned unlikely beauty from physically heavy materials, Triggered by Sunsets sees Montgomery take tragedy and isolation and process them into something brightly transcendent.
Today we have the pleasure of sharing ‘Take On Thee’, the album’s latest single and its most definitive celebration of such artistic commitment. Citing the likes of Burroughs, Baudelaire and the French new wave, Montgomery describes the track as “a shout out to poets, films, painters and artists of all sorts,” but moreover an acknowledgement of the intangible forces which drive such people. “To drugs and doing things wrong but ending up right,” as Montgomery continues. “Of falling and soaring. Embodying whatever weirdness makes you feel good and fully giving yourself over to that.”
Jay De Feo
Paint all night
Find The Rose
Within your mind
Talk real loud
Fuck real soft
Poetry
will sort you out
Triggered by Sunsets is out on the 30th June via Orindal Records and you can pre-order it now.
Cover art by Rachel Anne Duffy, layout by Jon Samuels, photos by Trevor Montgomery