September!

Edward Kamau Brathwaite
11.5" x 7.75"
oil on wood, 2010

September has come around and that means the Top 100 season is getting serious now. Less than six months to get all hundred paintings done. They'll be coming fast and furious now as I have to average one painting every two or three days in order to get it done. My time in the studio will have much more of a decisive character, no more fiddling (diddling, doodling, fidgeting) around. Still, no painting is officially done until the Top 100 2010 comes around. There were several older paintings that I picked up and worked on again this weekend as a matter of fact. All these paintings, scrolling through this blog, may not exist anymore in the form you see them in. I've changed the Cat Power painting, the Joseph Spence, the second Beth Orton, and the second Nina Simone (I may have to remove the original from this site as I decided to cover up a fair amount of skin.) But I can only paint as many paintings as there are songs guaranteed to be in the Top 100. With this Edward Kamau Brathwaite painting I've pretty much painted every one in the list so far. The painting I started immediately after the Coleman painting (see previous). I painted the background first, a copy of the design I used behind Ornette Coleman. In the Coleman painting this design were random colors and lines breaking up the picture plane and (random) black shapes to animate the edges of it. I repeated these in the new painting but now the colors, lines, and shapes are conscious in stead of random. Edward Kamau Brathwaite is a poet born in Barbados. The recording in the Top 100 is Wings of a Dove, a poem performed by Brathwaite. The recording can be found on a cd tucked in the book Sound States - Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technolgies, edited by Adelaide Morris.