At Home

Xylophone (Highland People, Vietnam)
11 x 14 inches, mixed media on paper, 2020

Jane Wiedlin
14 x 11 inches, stencilprint on paper, ed. 52, 2020

Top 100 Archive and Studio (in progress)

Home, weathering out the coronavirus outbreak. Teaching remote, twiddling around. I should have had the Archive building finished but a combination of know-how, or lack thereof and laziness keep me from achieving this coveted milestone. I'm getting closer however slow the progress. After finishing all 100 paintings for the Top 100 2019 I'm slowly starting to think about this year's. For no other reason than 'I just felt like it' I started faithfully copying an image from the booklet tucked in the LP Introduction to the Music of Viet Nam that has been a mainstay on my player in recent weeks. Earlier, in the context of my twice-annual stencilprint project with Art Appreciation students, I had already created a print depicting Jane Wiedlin, known for her part of the Go Go's. After watching a fantastic concert of Go Go's classics at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery earlier this year I chose Jane Wiedlin as subject to trading prints with students. Jane is being sent one too and so is the artist Beatriz Monteavaro who sat in on drums. I met them both and got a high five from Jane Wiedlin. So now there's two disparate works that could end up being the start of the Top 100 2020. I have not decided on a theme, style, format, or topic (if any) for the upcoming series.

The Top 100 2019 is finished!

György Ligeti

All images 14 x 11 inches, oil and spray paint on canvas, 2020

Les Siècles Live: György Ligeti (2016), directed by Francois-Xavier Roth featuring cover art that was found by the publisher Actes Sud on this very blog. A beautiful CD on which Les Siècles perform Six Bagatelles, Kammerkonzert, and Dix Pièces pour Quintette à vent. The last of these is in the top 100. I'm still very proud of their use of my painting. This one is brand new though.

Cat Power

For the upcoming Top100 2019 exhibition this painting replaces the concert drawing I did in September of 2019 that was to illustrate the track Robbin Hood from Cat Power's latest album Wanderer. The image above comes from an earlier Cat Power album Moon Pix. In the book called You Should Have Heard Just What I've Seen both my work, and the Moon Pix cover are featured. The Moon Pix cover is a work by renowned photographer Roe Ethridge.

Otto von Schirach

A track from my favorite hardcore disc Threat: Music that Inspired the Movie (Halo 8/King's Mob, 2006). The track Champagne Enemaz features a remix by Otto von Schirach of the recording by the Californian metalcore band Eighteen Visions. After Sun Ra, who I painted recently, von Schirach is yet another musician in this top 100 who claimed to have been born in outer space. His biography states that he was dropped either by UFO or Graviton in the third point of the Bermuda triangle, which is Miami. He was indeed born in Miami, FL in 1974 from German and Cuban ancestry. His grandmother practiced Santeria. As customary with DJs, I had assumed that breakcore musician von Schirach was an assumed name but apparently it's real. Typing von Schirach into Google search results in the biography of the infamous Nazi politician Baldur von Schirach.

Three Women performing 'Harawi'

The track Pasqakuymi comes from the cd Traditional Music of Peru, Vol. 6: The Aycho Region. Heard are women of Socos (Peru) performing Harawi. The women depicted above are not the women heard on the Pasqakuymi but part of a group performing harawi (a style of singing) on a later track on the CD. Pasqakuymi relates to, and is performed on Compadres' and Comadres' Thursday, part of the Peruvian carnaval following Ash Wednesday.

Mergen Mongush

Mergen Mongush is represented in both books (with cd inserts) that I have on the subject of Tuvan throat singing. In Overtone Singing by Mark van Tongeren three pages are dedicated to  including a biography. Mongush was born in Chadan, Tuva in 1962. The cd tucked in that book features an example of the 'chilangit' style of overtone singing that Mongush personally developed. Alash the track in the top 100, named after a Tuvan river) appears on the cd that accompanies the book Where Rivers and Mountains Sing: Sound Music in Tuva and Beyond by Theodore Levin.