An angel, arched like a half-moon and composed of interstellar debris, shafts of wheat, and children’s faces. Golden glowing cheeks and golden sparkling boots. Mother of creation.
In deciding on the artwork for the recent album, How Can I Possibly Sleep When There Is Music, I was drawn to this spirit of celestial compassion. This angelic figure, represented as a loving vessel for others, felt resonant with the album as a carrier of poetry across time, traditions, and cultures. It is also an image that I grew up with and one for which I hold deep affection.
More specifically, the album cover is a photograph of a silkscreened sweater designed by my Mama, Win Keenan-Kuplowsky.
In the 90s she had developed a creative and entrepreneurial practice of designing custom hand-painted and silkscreened sweaters, T-Shirts and dresses. She was in the midst of raising three boys, and this was a way of maintaining her art practice (she was a gallery artist and high school art teacher in her late 20s), as well as earning some money while on leave from work. I remember vividly the excitement of her open house nights, where she would set up our childhood home as a vendor's night, featuring her silkscreened clothing designs, and other local artists' wares. I was five or six and I can recall hiding under a table with an ink brush painting of a turtle I was trying to sell for five bucks.
Much of her work at the time was drawn to the sun and moon and she even painted my junior school library a deep blue with yellow and white stars in swirling, spiral brush strokes. Around that time, she also painted a costume for Halloween we called “Intergalactic Man”.
The image on the album cover in one sense arrives out of her pull towards the celestial, but also has a more specific source of inspiration.
In the 90s my Mama was volunteering for a grassroots volunteer initiative, Help Us Help, that brought aid to vulnerable children in orphanages across Ukraine. In 1994, she traveled to Ukraine with a team to assist in ensuring the aid was properly received. In one of the orphanages, an image of an angel on the wall imprinted in her mind and later developed into a sketch in which the angel was visualized as a celestial guardian for the children. The sketch developed into a painting and then later a silk screen print. It was also featured in the ten year anniversary of the Help Us Help organization – a group that is still doing important work in Ukraine to this day.
In my early 20s I started wearing my Mama’s sweaters and their brilliant renderings of suns, moons and angels. I often performed with them and they became a staple of my fashion.
What I enjoyed about how this record came together is how my encounter with Ryōkan opened up a process of gathering poets and sounds together, not to cohere into something harmonious, but rather as affective lures that resonate in their difference and complexity. It is a record of intuition and play, not concept or intention.The album cover’s own history and transposition into this world of diverging poets felt natural intuitively and I trusted that intuition. For me, it deepens the web of meaning and feeling the album's process gives rise to. (Did I make an angel blush?)
This is also not the first time my Mama’s artwork has been featured on my music. 2022’s Capturing the Evening Song features a pastel of hers adapted from an image my brother sketched of himself and our childhood cat, Yeats. The 2023 single Sudden Reach from the Inner World features a pastel of a turtle she drew on a whim while we collaborated on potential artwork ideas at the kitchen table. And even one of her painted sweaters can be seen on the album cover of 2016’s Summon Up a Monkey King. I sit locked eyes with my dear cat Rohmer sporting a black sweater with a golden sun face in the center.
She has been re-dedicated to her practice more fully in the last decade and I’ve included a few of her works below. You can follow her on instagram @winifredoffthemat
September Garden (2023)
Remembering (2023)
McMichael Cemetery (2022)
For those in the east-coast of Canada, I will be announcing some shows there soon. Eager to see you all and to enjoy the cool ocean breeze.
Yours in song,
Luka Kuplowsky
Thanks for reading Luka Kuplowsky! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
PS
Whenever I share one of these entries I’ll give you a window into the moment of writing –more specifically, the food/drink/music/film that has filled this specific day.
Listening to Lifetime, Happy Time (Yukihiro Takahashi) and Tempest (after basking in the glow of Bob in Syracuse)
Drinking a homemade smoothie (mango, strawberry, peaches, almond milk, spinach,Greek Yogurt, bee-pollen) and eating a handful of All-Dressed chips.
I just watched Xu Haofeng’s Sword Identity - It’s on Tubi! He is the great contemporary martial arts auteur. Also on Tubi are his brilliant films The Final Master & Judge Archer.His 2023 film 100 Yards (still unreleased) is possibly my favorite martial arts film of the last twenty years.
