Egypt

Nagat
12" x 9"
oil on canvas board, 2013

Nagat El Sagheera (pictured above) is an Egyptian singer I found through my friends at Bodega Pop, the one source to instruct me on the music from the Arabic world, old and new. Nagat is in between, neither old nor new, but a singer unlike I’ve ever heard in older or newer music. In stead of dwelling on this terrific recording of Ana Bashak El Bahr from the album Eyoun el Calb, I’ll talk about some of the techniques I used in painting these portraits. I direct you to Bodega Pop for more on Nagat (and you can listen to her music in the process).

After a series of double portraits I’m back to painting a single performer. Whenever a sort of series within the series happens (and this usually happens accidentally), there’s this urge to continue the trend. In 2006 I made the same attempt to paint all double portraits but then too, I gave up after the idea just didn’t make any sense anymore within the concept of the one hundred paintings. There’s a lot to be said for double portraits, both formally and conceptually, a whole range of ideas waiting to be explored, but I opt now to depart this exploration and leave it for the long term. Another thing the last series of paintings have in common is that the musicians are superimposed on landscape paintings that were made as demos for landscape painting classes I teach. And this, my friends, should continue, as at least three more of such 5 week classes are scheduled over the next few months. In contrast to last year’s, when the paintings were all done plein-air in my backyard. The new paintings are random Florida landscapes, and not as precious as the backyard ones. They are less planned out compared to last year’s. I randomly use these backgrounds as if they were blank canvases. You probably noticed that the landscape in the painting above was turned sideways. This also is the result of the randomness I treat the backgrounds with. For Nagat’s I simply chose to flip the landscape format of the demo into a portrait format. The choice is of course a formal one, but what does it mean conceptually? What does it do, for example, to my mantra “as it is above, so it is below?” Two halves of the composition exist side by side, rather than on top of one another. Except maybe in non-representational painting, or in diptychs, you don’t see this orientation much in two dimensional art. Sure the old Egyptians would paint trees sideways but they didn’t use the concept of the horizon. A concept abandoned again in the shift to non-representational painting that happened in the 20th century. In a parallel universe there’s no orientation. (Let’s leave it at that.)

And, by the way,….HAPPY NEW YEAR!

A Rundi Wake

Rundi women performing "Ubuhuha"
12" x 16". oil on wood, 2013

So my friend from the Netherlands came to visit for the holidays. He brought with him, as a gift, from his own collection, a fantastic set of records. My favorite so far from the set is a volume of traditional music from Burundi recorded in 1967. I've played the whole record several times already and it contains, perhaps the biggest bonus of all, an example of a lamentation that were traditionally performed during a wake. Once upon a time the lamenting of the dead was an almost universal practice but has since disappeared. About a year ago I compiled all examples I collected of recordings of such practices on a CD that I called Keening Songs and Death Wails. I am thrilled that I can add yet another one. Ubuhuha as these lamentations are called in Burundi is maybe my favorite of them all. (From the liner notes by Michel Vuylsteke:) "The women use their lips like reeds to set in motion the volume of air contained in the cavity formed by cupping both hands against their mouths. The resultant sounds vary in pitch, timbre and volume according to the postion of their hands and the  tension of their lips."

DEVO!

Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo
11' x 14", oil on canvas board, 2013

In 1984 the song Wiggly World by Devo made an appearance in the top 100 for that year. It came from the only LP that I owned of them back then, it was their second, the 1979 release Duty Now for the Future. Even though I acquired two more records in the following 29 years, Devo did not return to the list until this year when I met and befriended Jade Dellinger, (co)author of the book We Are DEVO! I read it and became hooked (again) to their story, their videos, and the music. The book is a "culturally essential" read, and I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in that era of (rock) history (the punk and new wave era that is). What I would recommend too is to watch (on YouTube) their video for Jocko Homo, a sort of Devo anthem. The video from 1976 is part of the short film (an art film) The Truth About De-Evolution. Jocko Homo was rerecorded in 1978 to feature on Devo's first album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!

I'm particularly interested in the concept of de-evolution (hence the name Devo), in which human kind, in stead of evolving is regressing backwards. It fits right in with the topic of paleolithic cave paintings that has kept my brain occupied for a while now. I have this vague notion that a concept (be it art, be it evolution) is at its strongest at the moment it appears. It is then when the circumstances are ideal for something to exist. Or as Devo would have it "the beginning is the end".

Women from Papeete

Women from Papeete 
(cd jacket of The Gaugain Years)
10" x 8".oil on canvas board, 2013

In front of me here I got this record with the title The Gaugain Years: Songs and Dances of Tahiti. The title is misleading because the songs on the record were not at all recorded during the Gaugain years but a good 75 years later. The text on the back sleeve puts Gaugain in the same category (tourists) as Captain Cook, missionaries, and European diseases. The text, however, is a fun piece of writing, full of irony, and from a very respectable source; that of the Nonesuch Explorer Series. It was written by Jane Sarnoff. She downplays the notion Westerners had of Tahiti as a synonym for paradise and argues that you would get a clearer picture of (pre-Western) Tahiti if you substitute “love,” and “easy living,” for “war,” and “oppression.” The song illustrated here is listed on the sleeve as Song for Birds in Flight and this is Sarnoff’s interpretation: “We may be romantically affected when we hear a singer in ecstasies about the flight of a bird (as if ‘we’ would be able to understand the words—ed.)—more likely the composer was trying to placate a bird after killing another one.” “No, the music of Tahiti isn’t just love—it’s hate, and fear, pride, and teaching, a way of life and a way to keep death at a distance.” The image in the painting comes from the jacket of the CD reissue of the LP (which hasn’t any photos). The photo (by Dennis Stock) includes a 1960s sports car. Gaugain would have rolled his eyes at that.

All the while, while painting these women from Papeete, I was thinking about the cave paintings of Lascaux. There is a hypothesis forming in my head. “What does that have to do with this painting?” you may ask yourself. And honestly: “I don’t know!”, but my intuition tells me that in some way it does.

A Greek myth

Breno Mello and Marpessa Dawn 
as Orpheus and Eurydice
11" x 14", oil on canvas board, 2013

My wife accuses me of gravitating towards the sad and subversive when it comes to works of music and visual art. Her choices are more those of a loving, romantic, and happy kind of human expression. While I obviously have to agree with her assessment, I can not explain it. I like to think that my choices are ART while hers are not, but deep in my heart I know this is not true. The questions that a comparison between our preferences raise are not easily answered, in fact it raises many more. Questions about the nature of creativity, the nature of art, the nature of love. Is a human being good or bad, peaceful or violent deep inside? And where is that place we call deep inside? Is it a construct, an illusion, or something real?

Western culture has its roots in the Classical Greek period, whose dramas and tragedies depicted the dramatic and tragic mythologies of their deities, who in turn are metaphors for what human beings essentially are. Did we inherit the tragic arts from the Greek? Is the whole concept of art Greek?

Enough of that existential questioning; I tried to paint a lovingly portrait of two Brazilian actors, the lead characters in the film Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus). The soundtrack for the 1959 French/Brazilian film came courtesy of the legendary Brazilian musicians Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfá. The story of the movie, of course, based on a screenplay by Vinicius de Moraes is an adaption of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. A story of true love with a tragic ending (but with a glimmer of hope at the end of the Camus film). The Top 100 this year features a track from the album, but not one written by either Jobim or Bonfá. In stead it is recording of traditional Brazilian music that is labeled as Générique on the sleeve.