Painting by Chief Z.K Oloruntoba
12" x 12", 1978
16" x 11.5"
oil on wood, 2010
"Free Jazz!" I exclaimed a few weeks ago. Now with Voice Poetry there's a second Ornette Coleman track in the Top 100 and a new painting is already made. Voice Poetry comes from the LP Body Meta, it's not free jazz but with a prize tag of only a dollar it was pretty cheap. I saw an asking prize of $60 on line but that of course is for a mint condition copy. Mine is not—not many of my records are—I hardly buy anything new, and I hardly ever pay more than $5 for a copy. The art work on the cover of the 1978 LP on the Artistshouse label by Nigerian artist Chief Z.K. Oloruntoba is psychedelic in an curious way. It reminds me of the recent work by Cincinnati painter Mark Harris, co-exhibitor in the soon ending show of our work at Country Club Projects in Cincinnati. I'll send him a copy of it, soon. It's the last week of his show called Morning Star. Go check it out before it closes; or if it's too far away:
http://www.countryclubprojects.com/exhibitions/mark-harris-morning-star/index.html
The above painting of Ornette Coleman isn't anything like it. It reminds me of the work by Columbus' painter Curtis Goldstein, not in subject matter but in painting technique. Similar too is the use of polarized (or enhanced otherwise) source material. The difference here is that Goldstein takes his own photographs and enhances them too whereas I take an image from elsewhere (from the Volkskrant in this case) and without much ado paint what's seen in the original (which is a Getty image of Coleman in concert in 2009). In this painting I used wider brushes than I usually do and worked wet in wet. I cannot make myself stick to certain techniques, I just get bored with it. I don't even have a preference to a certain technique, I use whatever I fancy. Every painting contains a few technical inventions that, of course, I can never remember, let alone repeat.
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