Thursday, May 29, 2014

Maria Alyokhina

Maria Alyokhina, 437 x 357 pixels, digital file, 2014
See, it's not just Nadya Tolokonnikova I use to illustrate the next Pussy Riot song. This digital portrait of Maria Alyokhina you see here is a first attempt to make use of this sketchbook full of quick pen drawings. Nothing too serious here, just another illustration for yet another song about Vladimir Putin, the most sung about person in the top 100. (There are a few songs in the list that muse about Allah, but Allah is not a person, is he?)

Nadya Tolokonnikova, 4" x 4.75", digital file, 2014
Alright then, Nadya Tolokonnikova is in the sketchbook too, but here's then yet another Maria Alyokhina for you.

Maria Alyokhina, digital file, 2014

 

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Edith Piaf

Édith Piaf
24" x 16"
oil on canvas paper, 2014
Édith Piaf is back in, a bit of a cliche perhaps for a self-proclaimed eclectic music enthusiast to resort to names that are standard fare in the world of eclectic music. Piaf and Umm Kulthum (as it appears to be spelled these days), are the musicians most synonymous with eclectic taste. I never payed much attention to Umm Kulthum but of Édith Piaf I collected quite a few discs over the years. The song in this year's list is the b-side to her 1947 signature single La Vie en rose called Un refrain courait dans la rue. The painting is done on top of a sketch of Mariko Gotō (who I painted last week). I covered Gotō's silhouette with a very dark purple before superimposing the laughing Édith Piaf. Usually I don't pick laughing poses but here is the exception.

Thursday, May 22, 2014

East European Folk Music

Vulkana Stoyanova
14" x 10"
oil on board, 2014
The traditional music of Eastern European countries continues to be a substantial part of the top 100. From instrumental dance music and a chorus of harmonizing women, to a lonesome shepherd's tune  and solo female lamentations, Balkan music is mesmerizing and beautiful. A handful of Eastern European acts still need to be painted for this series but I don't have a photograph available for any of them. Some of the Balkan records I have are well documented with data and photographs by the musicologists who recorded them but others less so (one performer is anonymous). The highest in the list is a solo vocal piece called Zhenish Me Mamo sung by Verka Tsoneva Dimitrova and appears on the Bulgarian edition of the amazing series The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music edited by Alan Lomax. Richly illustrated and documented but no picture of Ms. Dimitrova. So I pick by proxy; Vulkana Stoyanova is right next to Dimitrova on the album and they're practically neighbors too (by 100 miles or so). The tune was recorded in Dobrich by A.L. Lloyd in 1954.

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Huggy Bear

Niki Elliott and Karen Hill of Huggy Bear
20" x 16", oil on panel, 2014
The band Huggy Bear formed in 1991 in Brighton, England. They're associated with the Riot Grrrl movement but there's also two guys in the five-piece band, so they rather see themselves as "girl-boy revolutionaries." When I first painted them some ten years ago they were only known by their first names and photographs were sparse. They never signed for a major label but produced a string of records between 1991 and 1994. The tune in the top 100 is a 45 called Her Jazz.

Monday, May 19, 2014

Drawing Alela Diane

Alela Diane
4" x 4"
pen on paper, 2014
I've been drawing a score of musicians in my sketchbook. I don't know yet how, when, or where I will use these but it somehow I will. The sketches are very quick, I did about 30 in a little over four hours divided up over two evenings. Just a little exercise, maintenance of skill if you will, in portrait drawing. From these pages I particularly like this quick sketch (above) of Alela Diane. I still owe her (well myself really) a painting for the current top 100 illustrating the song Lost Land from her new About Farewell CD. (I already did one for The Way We Fall.) My history with Alela Diane goes back to 2009 when I saw her perform in Ohio. It was a wonderful little outdoor concert and I ended up buying from her the CD To Be Still there, she signed it for me too. I had also made some drawings during her performance. Drawing people in motion is quite a challenge, but I think I did well on this one (below).




Sunday, May 18, 2014

Midori

Mariko Gotō
24" x 18"
oil on canvas paper, 2014
Mariko Gotō is Japanese singer and guitarist. She started out in the band Usagi in the early 2000s before linking up with Midori. Not to be confused with the well know classical musician Midori Gotō, also from Osaki, she now has embarked on a solo career. Midori is described (by Wikpedia) as jazz punk. Other sources add to the mix: Screamo-punk-pop-noh-jazz fusion, I read in an article. All of that could indeed be applied to describe Midori's music, it's that kind of music where anything could be thrown into the mixed bag. Punk in Japan is a bit different from the British and American varieties, it's more integrated in pop culture, not as sweet as J-Pop but much sweeter than say Black Flag. Manga I guess is a big influence on the music in Japan, J-Pop and punk alike. The Top 100 13/14 contains two songs by Midori and one by Usagi. So I spent all weekend trying to paint this portrait of Mariko Gotō (below). I recently got a pad of canvas paper, kind of a sketchbook for oil paintings, the size of which is much larger than what I have been using recently. The painting is larger than life (which is awkward, if it comes to portraits) and, out of pure frustration, destroyed it after too many hours spent on it. Later I picked it up again trying to salvage what could be salvaged, but not after I started anew from a different source photo. That one, depicted above, was much better, and quite quick too. (Even though I have to make certain corrections.)


Mariko Gotō
24" x 18"
oil on canvas paper, 2014

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Big Freedia

Big Freedia
16" x 12", oil on canvas paper, 2014
It doesn't happen often, but every once in a blue moon you'll find a mainstream pop hit you'd consider the greatest thing ever, even if only for a brief time. That happened to me when I chanced upon the hit Y'all Get Back Now by Big Freedia. On the YouTube video of the song I saw and heard three minutes of nonconformist raw hip-hop energy like I had never seen before. The genre, a sub-genre of hip-hop, is apparently called 'bounce', Freedia's variety awkwardly dubbed 'sissy-rap', is closely associated with the current phenomenon of twerking (twisting and jerking). Twerking is a vernacular term only recently added to the dictionaries. It originated in New Orleans, just like Big Freedia Queen Diva (as he, Freddie Ross, calls himself), and the bounce genre do. Big Freedia was there from the beginning (early nineties) and is in fact credited with popularizing the genre.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

An art top 10



After finishing up an intense year teaching six sections of Art Appreciation that includes a complete survey of art, I thought it would be appropriate to forward a top 10 of artworks I've come in contact with this last year.

Saturday, May 10, 2014

Songs the Swahili Sing

 Yaseen Mohamed & Saada – Lala Mpenzie
Yaseen Mohamed
12" x 16", oil on canvas paper, 2014
To my surprise I was able to find an image of the Kenyan singer Yaseen Mohammed. Unfortunately I could not find a picture of Saada, the female half on a duet from the album Songs the Swahili Sing: Classics from the Kenya Coast on Original Music, produced by John Storm Roberts, and released in 1983. I used to love to listen to male-female duets but it's been a while since I got excited about one. This one I had known for a long time but I never owned it, and thus forgotten about it. Well, now I have a copy of that record and the duet that closes the record is as good as a duet gets. 
The Swahili are are an Islamic people living in coastal East Africa. That the background for Yaseen Mohamed is a seascape is merely coincidental. Like the previous painting (of Mark E. Smith) the background comes from an instructional painting for a cultural center art class. It is barely better than yesterday's still life but then (to my defense) it was never intended as a painting but rather as a record of me talking to students and forwarding several technical possibilities of how to make waves. In the end what I want from my students is that they make waves. (Not that I'm creating any myself.)

Friday, May 9, 2014

The Fall

Mark E. Smith (The Fall)
16" x 12"
oil on canvas paper, 2014

A quick little oil sketch on canvas paper depicting Mark E. Smith of the Fall done on top of a hopelessly awkward flowers-in-a-vase painting that I had laying around since the day I instructed a group of students how to paint flowers. How I was talked into that assignment I don't know, but I feel for those students who witnessed my louse attempt at a flower painting demo. I'm in the process of using up all demo paintings done in the past year-and-a-half. It just happened to be The Fall that got assigned to go on top of these flowers. If I'm gonna leave it at that I don't know. I do know that when it comes time to display the 100 paintings in a gallery setting I have a lot of work to do because half of the paintings are rather unfinished, abandoned at a point when I felt like writing about it on this platform. The song Hey Luciani! happened to be the highest in the list of the paintings I had not done yet. The song, recorded in 1986, is about Albino Luciani, who became Pope John Paul I for 33 days in 1976. (An excellent opportunity for me to publish an image of an old painting called Kings and Queens that depict a bunch of people of power—kings, queens, popes, cardinals, generals, and presidents. The painting was done in 1995. I don't know if Pope John Paul I is included in the painting.)
Kings and Queens
48" x 48"
oil on board, 1995

The Fall is really the music of my generation. The band did not feature too many times in the Top 100 but has accumulated points throughout the years nevertheless, and cemented a spot within the list of the 100 musicians with most points over the 32 years of list making. The very same photograph of Mark E. Smith (by Giles Price of the Telegraph) I had used before in a pop quiz compiled in honor of the 50th birthday of my friend Andy Spence, a huge fan of the band. The quiz consisted of 15 drawn portraits of people that I knew he would recognize. He had to win the quiz because the first prize was a record of Kurt Weill intended to be his birthday present. He did win, but not as convincingly as I had expected. Other portraits in the quiz included the footballer George Best, coach Avram Grant, film director Werner Herzog, and comedian Tommy Cooper. Here's that one too.

Mark E. Smith
5.5" x 4.25",
pen on paper, 2011


Thursday, May 8, 2014

Celia Cruz

Celia Cruz
12" x 9"
oil on board, 2014
It's a bit of a diary these writings. It reflects periods of excitement as well periods of self doubt and depression. The writings have embedded into it the memories of my infatuation with the music I write about and the process of making the painting. Each of the songs illustrated on this blog, represent episodes in my life in which it was meaningful. Sometimes they illustrate a topic, an attitude, or a feeling I was dealing with at a particular time while other times they're associated with a specific event. Mostly though, the songs represent a moment of intense empathy with the sounds, performers, or with the context. The paintings then represent a different moment in time than that of the music. They too, are sort of a diary, but independent from the music. They have their own internal psychology.
The Celia Cruz painting illustrates the song Mi Bomba Sonó, the first track on an album called La Tierna, Conmovedora, Bamboleadora. The album consists of sons, boleros, criollas, and bombas. Úrsula Hilaria Celia de la Caridad Cruz Alfonso de la Santísima Trinidad known simply as Celia Cruz, the Queen of salsa, was born in Cuba in 1925, immigrated to the United States in 1959, and died there in 2003. The event associated with Mi Bomba Sonó was a dance party on Thanksgiving 2013 when I picked this Celia Cruz record somewhat randomly from a stack of recently bought Latin records. I don't think I had ever played it before, but it sure turned out a good pick for dancing. We played the whole record, every track danceable. We had no idea when we were dancing a son, a bomba, or a criolla.

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Exoticism

Fille Watutsi. Ruanda - Urundi
12" x 9", oil on board, 2014
Exoticism is a term used in art history designating western art works depicting ‘primitive’ scenes. Gaugain, in this context, is probably the best known exoticist. Exoticism started in the 19th century. The term is closely related to orientalism, a style in art that depicts scenes (or uses features) from the Near, Middle, and Far East, as well as North Africa. Both terms allude to the patronizing Western (white, male usually) artist who caters to a Western white male audience. (Images of harems were particularly in vogue.) “Exoticism, by one definition, is the charm of the unfamiliar,” (Wikipedia) or in more complex definition “born of the age of imperialism, possessing both aesthetic and ontological value, while using it to uncover a significant cultural otherness.” (Wikipedia: Victor Segalen) Orientalism is associated with the Neo-Classicist and Romantic styles of 18th and 19th century art, whereas exoticism started in the 19th century and persisted into the 20th. When the terms exoticism and orientalism are used these days it is usually not meant as a complement.

Exoticism and orientalism were but an excuse for male painters to paint exotic bare breasted females. In truth I’ve used the excuse myself. I had another excuse too: the Top 100. Only in 2006 I vowed to abort this unseemly practice. Yet the definitions forwarded maintain to be a major factor in my practice. “The charm of the unfamiliar” and “to uncover cultural otherness” continue to inform my Top 100 series. Even worse than the true exoticist I do not travel to exotic places to record images first hand, I take them from photographers and the adventurers who were ambitious enough to do so. I am couch tourist as it were. Personally I extend the definition of exoticism to a much broader use which includes the work of anthropologists, musicologists, and other sciences that study material found in cultures and lands far away, and even to tourists who travel exotic locations. Much of the music in the top 100 was recorded by those who indeed felt that urge to “uncover cultural otherness.”

Exoticism (or orientalism) in music typically refers to classical music from the 19th century such as the opera Aida by Giuseppe Verdi, but can be applied to any music that used ‘exotic’ sounds in the composition at any time in history. “The pervasive impact of racial perceptions and realities on the production and consumption of music clearly shapes musical exoticism.” (Exoticism, W. Anthony Sheppard) What I’m interested in, however, are not exotic elements in Western music, but recordings made in ‘exotic’ cultures. These recordings can be both commercial, with questionable intentions, or academic ‘field’ recordings that have scientific integrity. The latter, of course, more interesting, but both genres equally ‘exotic’ and both have a function in the documentation of such cultures.

The medium par excellence for exoticism is however photography. From the ‘kitsch’ erotically motivated postcards of the 19th and 20th century, via amateur tourist snapshots, to the academic anthropological documentation, photography as no other medium, has exoticism engrained in its essence, as it by definition almost, seeks to “uncover a significant otherness.” The photograph I used as a source for the painting above, is a vintage postcard depicting a Watusi girl from 1960. The recording it illustrates is Akazéhé, par une jeune fille, was made in Burundi in 1967 by Michel Vuylsteke. It appeared on Burundi: Musique traditionelles, my favorite ‘exotic’ record in this year’s top 100.

Monday, May 5, 2014

Tswana Men and Their Flutes

"Tswana men dancing and playing their pipes"
12" x 15", oil on board, 2014
Godumaduma Gwa Mosadi is a wonderful piece of flute dance music recorded by the great Hugh Tracey ca. 1948 in Botswana. It is one of the all time favorite recordings of music excavator Jonathan Ward. I found it on Ward's Excavated Shellac site as part of an all flute year-end-mix. The source photograph for the painting comes from the African Music Transcription Library and could have well been taken by Tracey himself, who also wrote a note for the recording: "The simple flute ensemble dances of a simple people. To the tune of these pipes the men dance slowly round in a circle." At the recording there were 16 pipers, of which only four made it into my back yard. I don't know if Modiseng, the leader of the group is included in the photo from the Transcription Library (or in my painting).

Sunday, May 4, 2014

Joy Division

Joy Division
9" x 12"
oil on canvas, 2014
Joy Division is a legendary cult band from Manchester. They only existed (with that name) for two years, from early 1978 until May 1980, when their singer Ian Curtis committed suicide. They took their name, which refers to a prostitution wing of a Nazi concentration camp, from a novel called House of Dolls . Before Joy Division they were called Warsaw (from May '77), and after Curtis died the remaining members continued as New Order. Their history starts in 1976, when founders Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook attended a Sex Pistols concert. Sumner recalled "(The Sex Pistols) destroyed the myth of being a pop star, of a musician being some kind of god that you had to worship". The band had a cult status since their very first gig, and to this date they remain to be this almost mythical band form the late seventies. I've had the pleasure to see the band Jam Division perform Joy Division covers on numeral occasions, I've seen exhibitions dedicated to their memory, and I've heard Joy Division mentioned as an impetus for more than a few distinguished careers in contemporary art. Hundreds of bands have covered their music and there are at least fifteen records produced, throughout the world, that are tribute albums. The top 100 now contains a track from one of these: Warszawa: Tribute to Joy Division with Joy Division covers by Polish bands. The track is She's Lost Control by the band Ścianka from the city of Sopot on the Baltic coast.

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Geechie, Elvie, and Me

L.V. Thomas
20" x 16"
oil on board, 2014
★Last Kind Words Blues by Geechie Wiley, accompanied by a certain Elvie Thomas, was the #1 in the Top 100 of 1999.
★The 1994 documentary film Crumb, by Terry Zwigoff introduced me to the song. 
★Robert Crumb owned a 78 disc of the song, one of only 10 discs known to exist of the duo that recorded only six sides.
★Like many others, and myself, the journalist John Jeremiah Sullivan became fascinated with the song after seeing the movie.
★Last Kind Words Blues was recorded in 1930 and is considered a masterpiece. 
★Wiley and Thomas were as obscure as obscure gets. 
★50+ years of researchers' efforts yielded very little information, not even the real names of the two performers.
★John Sullivan set out on a fifteen year journey to uncover the identity of the two women.
★The journey saw the first results when Sullivan met Mack McCormick, a veteran in the field of blues research.
★In McCormick’s files Sullivan found a mention of a woman guitar player “as good as any” named L.V. Thomas.
★Miss Thomas was still alive when McCormick did research on her, this was in 1961. 
★Eventually Sullivan identified the two women. Geeshie (as he spells it) was Lily Mae Wiley, nee Scott, and Elvie was L.V. Thomas, nee Grant.
★Lily May Scott was born in 1908 in Natchez, MS, while L.V. Grant was born in 1891, in Houston, TX.
★L.V. Thomas died in 1979 (in Houston), when Lily Mae Wiley died is not known.
★Lily Mae Scott killed her husband, Thornton Wiley, in 1931.
★Wiley and Thomas were likely involved in a lesbian relationship.

Friday, May 2, 2014

Naseebo Lal

Naseebo Lal
14" x 11"
oil on canvas board, 2014
You may have noticed the high percentage of paintings (on this blog) of female singers. If it comes to the human singing voice, this year in particular is indeed the year of the domination of the female voice. While men still dominate the instruments (a stat impossible to count), almost 80% of the voices in this top 100 are of women. Naseebo Lal is the latest singer to enter into the list. She is a singer from Lahore, Pakistan who was arrested in 2009 for singing vulgar songs. She is one of Pakistan's "topmost" singers, but I have not been able to find any news about her after the court hearing following the arrest. The following paragraph comes from the Pakistani on-line newspaper The Daily Times:
"He (Asim Mahmood, petitioner) said Naseebo Lal and Nooran Lal (her sister, also a singer) with the connivance of other respondents were busy in making and singing illegal, indecent and immoral songs. He requested the court to ban all the audio and video songs of the two singers and their certification and exhibition might also be banned."
This then is from another article from that same newspaper, appearing around the same time:
"The petitioner, Asif Mehmood Khan, said the departments concerned in connivance with some other criminal elements were not only violating the law and the constitution, but also spoiling the integrity, sanctity and morality of society."
Mrs. Lal, in her defense, claimed that her producer forced her to sing these vulgar songs. 

Naseebo Lal is not the only singer who had run ins with the authorities because of their music. The following list are the ten best scoring musical acts in this year's top 100. Note that eight are female singers, and at least two of these have received death threats because their music posed a threat to the "integrity, sanctity, and morality of society".
  1. Cat Power                
  2. M.I.A.                    
  3. Alela Diane                
  4. Pussy Riot                
  5. Rahsaan Roland Kirk            
  6. Kimya Dawson                
  7. Geechie Wiley and Elvie Thomas    
  8. Björk                    
  9. Michael Hurley 
  10. Rosa Balistreri               
In the next blog I'll talk about Geechie Wiley and Elvie Thomas as I'm currently working on a portrait of L.V. (Elvie) Thomas.      

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Tracey Emin

Top 100 2002: Singles Tent
6' x 7' x 8', paper and wood, 2003
  
Another artist who operates in the higher regions of the contemporary art world, and who I admire greatly, is Tracey Emin. Like Peyton, she’s about the same age as myself. Unlike Peyton however, she grew up in Britain, being a teen during the punk rock era. Her work, I believe, cannot be dissociated from that. It really is punk. I envy that. Her most notorious work is a tent that is called Everyone I Ever Slept With 1963-1995. She built her tent a good six or seven years before I built mine. I didn’t know of Emin until fairly recently and neither had I seen her tent when I built mine, but it certainly was an inspiration, if only in retrospect. The tent I built in 2003 is my only foray into sculpture, or installation art, and fills me with loads of precious memories. I built it as a celebration of doing the Top 100 for twenty straight years then. In it were pillows, blankets, a portable 45 player, and a bunch of selected singles. Its walls were made from 45 rpm single covers, those that were issued by record companies, those with logos and a hole in the middle, holes that, when lit strategically, would cast beautiful shadows in, and outside the tent. The opening reception was well attended. Among the visitors that night were three gorgeous female fashion models, who in the early morning hours, when it all was about to end, engaged in a wrestling match inside the tent. Even though the walls were built from paper-thin paper, I did not intervene and tell them to be easy on the fragile tent. Not a single ‘single’ sleeve broke.


Tracey Emin, Everyone I've Ever Slept With, 1963-1995
tent with fabric stitchings, 1995, Saatchi, London

Elizabeth Peyton

Top 100, 2004: Cat Power
11" x 6", oil on board, 2004
About fifteen years ago I saw a painting by Elizabeth Peyton depicting the rock star Liam Gallagher. I immediately recognized, in that one painting, a certain kinship in our work. It felt empowering that her work, feeling a similarity in sensibility and attitude with mine, was so highly esteemed in the contemporary art world. There’s a similarity in chronology too; we’re about the same age, started out with somewhat clunky drawings in the late eighties, and moved on to produce small oil portraits of musicians on boards in the nineties. Between the two of us she’s the better painter and for sure the more professional. Where my career was marred by detours and missed opportunities, her’s went straight up. Since the early 2000s I’ve gained a bit of recognition, my work has been shown in the same spaces as hers, even in the same exhibition, collected by the same collectors, and reproduced in the very same book, but my work never gained the exposure her’s did. I’m like her amateur little brother (even though I’m a bit older), not being able to fully get out of the little boy’s room, and still dabbling away at that what started us in the beginning. I’ve never met ms. Peyton.


Elizabeth Peyton
Blue Liam, 17" x 14"
oil on board, 1996
Gavin Brown Enterprise