Sung Poetry of North Vietnam

Performer in Unesco documentary on Ca Trú
10" x 7.5"
pencil on paper, 2010

Top 100 updates: Spring and Summer remain slow. Soundtrack this past month are vuvuzelas, the most annoying instrument on earth. My least favorites instruments used to be Scottish pipes and Peruvian pan flutes but both I've grown to like and have been represented in past Top 100s. I don't think the vuvuzela will ever make it but the Dutch perform well in the World Cup so far and I continue to listen to this annoying instrument. I know people that really love the sounds (of traffic and such) of the big city, and according to the performer the Lord Buckley, the spinning wheel was Mahatma Gandhi's favorite instrument of all India.

I didn't paint for two weeks but today, a nice hot and quiet Sunday, I worked with this image of a Vietnamese performer of Ca Trú, a traditional form of sung poetry. The image comes from a video documentary on the subject published by Unesco. First I tried ink, then I used markers, and on this third one I only used a pencil. I intend to make a painting and the drawing above is a sketch for it. Usually I don't make a separate sketch for a painting but the image, I think, demands it this time. The traditional sung poetry of North Vietnam is a very strict art form. The performance is subject to many regulations. So many that the performances are completely devoid of emotion, sexuality, and spontaneity. The resulting sound (as well as the visual presence of the performers) is delicate, airy, eerie, frail, and contains a strange sense of beauty. The tradition is 900 years old, threatened with extinction, but protected by the cultural authorities, and well recorded. I felt that while drawing the female singer, who also plays a simple percussion instrument, I needed to take very good care of depicting the subtleties of expression and pose. Like the music in which beauty is derived from strict regulations the painting to be also should be executed with the utmost technical preparations. "When singing her mouth should not be opened so widely" is one of the restrictions imposed on the singer. I'm going to paint an image of Ca Trú and I won't open my mouth.

One of the most interesting anecdotes from the world of ethnomusicology I've come across, comes from the great Alan Lomax, who observed that more restricted social mores and behaviors of a society result in a more nasal style of singing. I'm going to paint this image of Ca Trú in falsetto, in a minor key. Where is the pain in painting?

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Darkthrone
23.5" x 12"
oil on wood, 2010

A slow season in Top 100 world, it's summer, there's a world cup going on, there's my job at the gallery. Unexpectedly a new exhibition was scheduled when it should have been the slow season. Too busy, can't even watch the world cup games because they are played at times when I have to work. I've seen just a few minutes here and there, 15 minutes Brazil, 10 minutes Japan, I didn't see Portugal at all. I got up early this morning to see if the New Zealand team would perform the haka (see April post: Sports and Music) but they didn't. Doom and gloom all over. Haven't been in my studio much, hardly made any Top 10s, hardly found any new music to listen to. To catch up on making a painting for music that already secured a Top 100 2010 spot, I painted this Darkthrone. Last year I used the same image (from a photo by Peter Beste) but painted the two Darkthrone members, Fenriz and Nocturno Culto separate. My composition compared to Peter Beste's is cropped and that's my favorite part of it. I don't know why I did it (I never crop my figures) but I like it. I tell my students that if you work on a painting or drawing and a crazy impulsive idea comes to your mind, to never reject that idea but to explore it. That idea is your unconscious telling you how to make the work worthwhile. I also tell my students that they shouldn't think too much about what they are doing. Thinking about a crazy impulsive idea for sure ends into a rejection of it. I proudly tell them that this is probably the only class they will encounter in college in which the teacher discourages thinking. Descartes turned inside out, "I wish I was a mole in the ground, so I could root that mountain down".

Bob Marley

Bob Marley
12" x 10"
oil on wood, 2010

I'm a fan of football, I go crazy for it. I played as a kid, I played as an adult, I watch it whenever I can. In five days the world cup starts and I'm getting really nervous. It could be the year that the team I'm rooting for –our national team, the Dutch that is– will become the next world champions. Yesterday the team (and me too for that matter) suffered a major setback in its bid though, as their star player Arjen Robben suffered an injury and most likely will miss out on the entire competition. I wanted to paint a football picture. In the late eighties I painted a lot of football pictures, my first solo exhibition was filled with depictions of my football heroes. But then I started to paint my music heroes. Both topics are driven by fan obsession but there is a big difference: The music paintings are a celebration of the human mind whereas the football paintings celebrated the body. The Wexner Center for the Arts, the #1 venue for contemporary art in this city, just organized the exhibition Hard Bodies, all about that celebration, all about masculinity. I'm not interested in a celebration of masculinity, I can appreciate a good play but I don't care for the aesthetics of it and even less for the player's good looks. I teach figure drawing to art students which is also purely about the body but not so much about masculinity. Most models are very feminine (and very beautiful) as a matter of fact.

The only picture of a musical hero playing football I know of is of Bob Marley. Bob Marley was a football fanatic and friend of Jamaica's biggest football star of the 70s Allen Cole (who was kicked off his last team for wearing dreadlocks). Convenience will have it that after seven years of absence Bob Marley is back in the Top 100 list. My wife Maria pulled this old tape I recorded for her twelve years ago, out of the drawer and played it many times. My (and her as well) favorite Bob Marley song these days is also the most spiritual from the African Herbsmen album on that tape: Put it On. "I rule my destiny. Oh Lord I thank you."

Blooddawn

Donn of Blooddawn
11" x 8.5"
ink and acrylic on paper, 2010

In black metal circles Blooddawn is best known as a song by the Swedish band Marduk. The word comes from a role playing game situated in Earth’s Second Dark Age. The players are prophets send to the blasted ruins of Earth. No wonder the term is popular among black metal bands. The bands Redrum and Lut’ also have songs with that title (they may be covers of the Marduk song, I don’t know), and there are several bands named Blooddawn: A trash metal band from Germany, black metal bands from Brazil and the UK, and there is a death metal band called Blood By Dawn. The British band is from Newcastle upon Tyne in the Northeast. Donn and P are their members, and their song Nailed Fist is found on the cd accompanying the only metal magazine I have: Zero Tolerance (#33), the same magazine I found Vampyre Corpse in. I don’t know what it is about black metal images that makes me pull out my sketchbook and draw with black ink (rather than my usual oil on wood.) Maybe I do know what it is about black metal but am too embarrassed to tell.