Biography
of JON DICKINSON
featured
in "BEETHOVEN UNLIMITED" Concert
Saturday, October 2, 2004
at 8:00 pm AND
Sunday, October 3, 2004 at 3:00 pm, Kaul Auditorium, Reed College
JON
DICKINSON co-created
with composer Robert Coburn over a dozen mixed-media, collaborative performances
across the U.S. These combine musical and visual works, some based upon original
color graphical musical scores "composed" especially for live-performance
improvisation.
Moving
from New York to Portland in the mid-1960's, with degrees from Cornell University
in Electrical Engineering and Law, Jon has focused his professional life on
the practice of Intellectual Property Law. By its essential nature, this practice
has centered on engagements with an extensive variety of curious and creative
people -- collectively exploring a wide range of innovative concepts, including
those rooted in the classically recognized fields of the visual, musical and
performing arts.
Avocationally,
and while professionally focused on the fruits of others' creative activities,
Jon independently engaged his own personal search for artistic expression, chiefly
through projects touching on the visual and musical arts. From these projects
has emerged a large body of original drawings, paintings and other kinds of
graphic works which are today held in various private collections. Included
in these graphic works is a visionary and extraordinary collection of special
drawings, still growing in number, entitled "Normal Cells -- The Anti-Cancer
Series". These drawings were launched to provide special positive visualization
tools for his wife to employ in her now successful and complete recovery from
high-stage colon cancer. Beyond playing their remarkable role in the very personal
and shared winning experience of challenging cancer to a duel for success, copies
of many hundreds of these "Series" drawings today reside in the hands
of numerous others distributed throughout the United States, and elsewhere,
who are dealing with the world of cancer.
From this professional, and
not too distant, artistic background, the current "Egmont project"
-- an original retelling of the masterpiece play Egmont written by Goethe, and
scored by Goethe's younger contemporary Beethoven -- marks for Jon a new and
significant departure into the arena of the spoken performance.
