How To Pass Wonder On
by Beston Barnett
milkpaint, printed paper, plywood, 4 ft. x 4 ft.

Beston: This bas-relief sculpture consists of eight mounted one foot square pieces of plywood which have been built up and carved into abstract images.  Each square has an incised white "constellation" that relates to the numbers grouped in the middle.  The numbers are up on little stilts, which can only be seen in this photo through the long shadows they cast.

From the "Analysis": The artwork on the album cover is meant to be a visual parallel to the process by which the music was created.  To sum it up: start with something 'natural' or 'meaningful', superimpose it against a set of related structures to produce a series of pieces, and then enhance the series with color and texture.   The pattern of numbers in the center of the painting is the 'natural' element: they are actually the song titles in order from top-to-bottom and left-to-right.  The squares around the outside show counting systems like meters superimposed on the numbers in the middle.  The upper left is a kind of connect-the-dots by one: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10.  The second, clockwise, counts by two: 1-3-5-7-9, 2-4-6-8-10; the third by three: 1-4-7-10, 2-5-8, 3-6-9, and so on.  By the eighth, the pattern has fragmented into dots because the count is so high: 1-9, 2-10, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.  Lastly, paint and sculptural elements flesh the patterns out, as the musical arrangements flesh out the words and rhythms of the album.

Here's the original sketch for the project.  Note that a different ordering of numbers in the center produces a different set of constellations in the eight squares.  There's also some interesting ideas for rhythms and chords floating around in the margins.
Beston: The art for How To Pass Wonder On owes much to the work of Lucio Muņoz, which I encountered while traveling in Spain in 1999.  At left is his Pintura sobre tabla from 1959.
These are the original notes for "zero".  Note how the meter (which is really "no meter", since there are no repeating patterns) has been notated above the words with dots and dashes: dots for heavy downbeats, circles for lighter downbeats, dashes for offbeats.

From the "Analysis": Each song represented a unique challenge for me in terms of finding an aesthetic compromise between natural and metrical spoken rhythms:  I would take a set of lyrics and try to fit it to a meter.  Or, put another way, I would try to keep the natural flow of the words, but let the meter bring out its own emphasis.