Group from Kigali

Two pygmy musicians
16" x 12", oil on wood, 2013

Different painting, but the same song as in last year's 100. Here's the link to the text and image from March this year. Painted on top of a landscape of my backyard that I turned 90〬.

Pop Music: Björk

Björk
10" x 8", 2013
oil and pastel on canvas

Music that could be labeled as pop is sparse in my top 100, and paintings of pop stars I make only once so often. I don't hear much pop music. I've established a mechanism that excludes me from hearing it too much. I mean, it's easy these days, you pick yourself what you listen to. You don't need radio or tv anymore and indeed, I have neither of them. Last weekend I indulged in a lot of listening to Icelandic pop star Björk. I always liked her music, as I did also like The Sugarcubes (the band she was in before her solo career), but—to my own surprise—she was never featured in any of the previous 30 top 100s. So it's kind of overdue...

La France...

François Dufrêne
pastel on board, 2013
14" x 6"

Oh, the lure of poetry. Poetry may well be the greatest of all arts, one of the oldest too. To be a poet is like the most non-materialistic profession one can occupy. It's from the outset an ill fated profession, the work of a dreamer completely devoid of action. (And therefore it is the noblest of all professions). It is the art form that most defies all commodification, that defies all popularization, all establishment. There's no fame or glory in poetry. I always understood the nobleness of poetry, but I never understood poetry. I've always become extremely bored with poetry, never made it through a volume. But I tried. I always feel inadequate reading poetry, especially when reading poetry criticism. There's so much meaning in poetry that seems only to elude me. Yet, I've tried to write some, I've even published a few in a zine, but it's been an act of defiance; to make public the inadequacy of my intellect. François Dufrêne was a poet, a Lettrist poet, and a pioneer in the field of sound poetry. He was a painter too, known for his technique he called decollage. And he enters my top 100 (as a sound poet) for the fourth time.

Three portraits of Dufrêne. 2006, 2009, and 2010

Some of the poetry I wrote is in French. I don't know much French, just a few words, but not enough to understand the language, and certainly not enough to write in that language, but maybe just enough to write poetry. I figured that without the knowledge of a language I wouldn't have any of the blockage that I experience writing in a language that I do speak. What follows then is gibberish, unintelligible to French speakers, and an embarrassment to myself. It didn't keep me from writing nonsensical French poetry. I filled quite a few pages with it. The following is an outtake of a page-and-a-half that I wrote last week. It's the paragraph that contains an allusion to Dufrêne.

..........Du chien, du frene, du gratulin, comme c’est faire ne pas de rien. Oubliet con gavilette, dans le fete sans briolet. Un cri de loupe attender les filles de frere, mais l’ecole errants la sacre fleur. Nous sommes l’ete, hurlement le chaud temps, arrive tres atterdes. Oui, ma oeil savile huile, mais non, je fais les rouges.......

K.B. Sundarambal

K.B. Sundarambal
13⅜" x 6",
oil on wood, 2013

Re-listening to nominated songs, researching their performers, looking for images, and preparing some boards to paint on; the production of a hundred paintings for the music year 2013 has started in earnest. This weekend I painted the Indian star K.B. Sunderambal. Small as it is, I spent a good number of hours on it. I stumbled upon a recording of Sundarambal on the blog Bodega Pop. The song Pazhari Mali Medi comes from a cd called Kalathil Azhiyatha Kariyam(The Film Hits of K.B. Sundarambal). It was recorded in 1969 for the film Thunaivan. K.B. (Kodumudi Balambal) Sundarambal was born in 1908 in Erode, Tamil Nadu, in South India. She grew up in poverty apparently singing for a handouts in trains when she was a little girl. It was in a train she was discovered and she made her theater debut at age 19, starting a long and successful career that led to her nickname "The Queen of the Indian Stage" (source: Wikipedia). Pazhari Mali Medi is with 2:41 a relatively short song when it comes to Indian cinema. The first 30 or 40 seconds is where it's at. Those precious seconds features her unaccompanied voice. At age 61 her voice is as strong and passionate as you'll ever hear. Then the tablas and sitar come in, the voice lines repeat themselves before the song is interrupted by a short dialogue from the film. The song picks up again into an  intense crescendo. Sundarambal was politically active, became the first film personality to enter a state legislature in India. She died in 1980.

The Birth of Art

Jennie Williams and Nathalie Frost
24" x 12". gouache on oil on canvas, 2012-3

Hand prints, or stencils, are considered the first paintings of human kind. They are a metaphor for the birth of art, and therefor touches on essential characteristics of art as we understand it to be. When, in 1941, the Lascaux caved were discovered, the French writer George Bataille was one of the first to see it. He wrote a book about it: Lascaux, or the Birth of Art. In the chapter When Men First Began to Play he differentiated play with work: Play, as opposed to work, serves no function towards the sustenance of of the human race or the player itself. It is, to use Maya Deren's words: "to conceive beyond necessity", an activity of leisure, a wasteful use of energy, a luxury good. Some years later, Jean-Luc Nancy, another French writer gives this spin of the traced hands: "The traced figure is the trace of the strangeness that comes like an open intimacy, an experience more internal than any intimacy, deep-set like the grotto, open like the aperity and the appearance of the wall. The traced figure is this very opening." In other words: when the walls of the caves, opaque as they are, through the image of the traced hand become a window to the world, they open up to a whole new world, the world beyond the material world as we see it, a world of imagination and creativity. These are the ideas behind this painting in which I intended to open up the opaque ground that is an existing top 100 painting and reintroduce that playful activity that a top 100 painting ought to be. The top 100 started as hobby, and will remain that way (essentially). The existing painting is of two Inuit girls playfully performing a katajjaq (which is a type of throat-singing that is considered just a game). The girls, Jennie and Nathalie, in close proximity, looking each other in the eyes, sing to each other until one wins the game, that is when one misses a beat or starts laughing. This is the end of the song in which was imitative of sounds from nature. Jennie and Nathalie are distant descendents of the people who projected their hands on the cave wall, who migrated north to Siberia, crossed the Bering Strait, and settled in North America. We are too, most all of us, descendents of these peoples that struck Bataille, and Nancy, and Deren too, with awe. And we continue to play, to make our marks on a box car or concrete overpass, to draw a mustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, draw a straight line on a map and walk it too.
I wasn't able to control the painting (but I wiped away the paint that covered Jennie's face). It didn't feel like play (there was no laughter).
Art is defiant
Art is subversive
Art is laughter
Art is—war was, worship—warship, ashes to ashes—dust to dust

The demo

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
oil on canvas board
8" x 10", 2013

Hello again, it's been awhile since a brand new painting was posted here. I've been quit busy with my 7 class assignment this semester. It's not that I haven't been painting, but the paintings I did were all demos for the studio classes. Lots of landscapes (that surely will turn into top 100 paintings), lots of portraits (that I gave to the respective sitters), and also lots of dirty palettes (that will also turn into paintings). This portrait of Pussy Riot's Nadezhda Tolonnikova was the first to go on top of a palette. I painted it the very day the news came out that she disappeared, moved by Russian authorities to an unknown location. I sure hope all of us will hear her story when she gets out of jail, if she ever gets out alive. Putin Light Up the Fires was Riot's last single before their infamous Orthodox Church performance that was the cause of a jail sentence for two members of the Pussy Riot group. It was in last year's 100, and will be in this year's again. The music is simply where it's at in term of punk rock. Ms. Tolokonnikova, a political activist, and conceptual artist, is the voice of Pussy Riot. She wrote the manifesto to protect the integrity of the group, and was described as "the evil genius behind the group." I suspect she also wrote most of the lyrics for the group. 

Demo painting is an art in itself; you're not supposed to screw up being the instructor. But I also need to keep up the integrity of my own painting practice. Practice what I preach. I preach that creativity is more important than technique, that the unconscious knows more than the conscious mind does, and that a successful painting requires the letting go of that consciousness so that the other part can take over. The trouble is with those demos that you're expected to talk your way through, that while you let your unconsciousness make the decisions on the canvas, your voice immediately translates it to the conscious side of the brain. That, and the need for a good result, creates a lot of pressure, and it requires the utmost form of focus and concentration. Sometimes I mess up. 

The M.I.A. portrait of the stencil print below was done in the context of my art appreciation class to non-art majors. As a homework assignment I had (all 53) students make a stencil in an edition of 10. They would keep one to submit with their portfolio for review, and trade eight with class members and the last one with me. The M.I.A. below was their reward. Not every student did the work so I still have about 10 prints left. Let me know if you want one. You can have one for $50. I've already painted M.I.A. for this year's 100, as her Born Free song makes the list for the fifth(!) time, and now this print then is dedicated to her second best song (in my opinion) Paper Planes. Even for Paper Planes it's already the third time in the list. (No other song of hers ever made the list.)

M.I.A.
stencil print on paper, 45/53
6.5" x 6", 2013