20x10

Sokona, oil on canvas, 20"x10". 2023

Sacred flute music from New Guinea (cover image)

Sosa/Duval

Mercedes Sosa

 

Denise Duval

OOO

 

Ashaninka (Campa) Indian, various materials on drywall, 17"x11"

I've been thinking about randomness recently, and surrealism. Fact #1 is that it's impossible to consciously act random. Why would you even want randomness? Well, randomness is organic, it seems to replicate the processes of nature, while conscious composition seems laborious in comparison. The unconscious is, per the surrealists, and Sigmund Freud, where the truth and the essence of being is situated. Fact #2 is that computers are better equipped to act in a random fashion. They are also better in rational thinking, compared to us subjective creatures. Do computers have consciousness, and thus an unconsciousness then? What I want to know is if the randomness of computers would act according to the same set of laws (as in fractal theories for example) as an organic entity would act. Aretribve  there hidden esoteric forces at play as a result of humans creating technology in their own image? These mystic attributes are surely unintended by the creators of technology (AI included.) The above image is a work still in progress. It was formed as a byproduct of a stencil I made to start off the Top 100 2023. I made about ten variations of this image, using the positive or negative stencil in the processes. 

Happy Holidays by the way. The newest painting is unrelated to that but I was thinking about the Trinity in painting this. Shown are a woman with two children who are depicted on the back cover of the album Indiens et Animaux Sauvages d'Amérique du Sud.  They are from the Wayapi tribe who live in the Amazon region in Brasil, illustrating the Top 100 track Yopanama.

Wayapi Indians, oil on canvas, 12"x12", 2023

Wassie or wasn't she?

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, pen on paper, 12"x9"

The year I first visited the birthplace of the renaissance yields much Italian music, including one from the most famous renaissance composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525-1594). He is not from Florence though, but from Rome, well Palestrina, to be precise. I can't remember in what context I heard Osculetur me osculo, but I do remember it made an impression on me.

Alice Stephens, pen on paper, 12"x9", 2023

Alice Stephens (1904-1984) was a Lithuanian-American singer and leader of a vocal folk ensemble under her own name.

Eténèsh Wassié, oil on canvas, 9"x7", 2023

Wassie (b. 1971) is the aunt of Selemnesh Zemene, who prominently featured in last year's Top 100, and, like Zemene, comes from Gondar in Ethiopia.

Giovanna Marini, oil on canvas, 9"x7", 2023

 

Always learning, never getting better

Iannis Xenakis, oil on canvas, 9"x7", 2023

I've done a couple of smaller paintings the last couple of weeks, as life has been insanely busy. These paintings have been an opportunity to work on my technique. In every painting there are new inventions, new to me at least, from things often as simple as how to hold the brush to stumbling across new color balances. I've always felt that way: there has always been something I learned in every new painting. You'd think paintings then get better over time, yet this is not the case. Prehistory was as much art as modernity, every period has its ups and downs. I'm working on getting a website together (it'll be here soon) and I've looked at many older and really old works in the process. Since this is a Top 100 blog I'll share some of the history with you: Here's first Lenny Bruce, from the Top 100 1999. (The work was most likely created in 2000.)

Top 100 1999: Lenny Bruce, oil on found photo, 5.5"x8.5", 2000

The next one I don't know, don't remember much about. It must have been made around 2003 or 2004, as I was experimenting with techniques like those used in this work on paper. I do remember it belonging to a Top 100. I estimate the size being about 3 feet wide. The slide was simply labeled: Amazon.

Amazon group, acrylic and charcoal on paper, c. 2x3 feet, c. 2004

This painting, again I have no idea where it is, might have been the first Cat Power painting, perhaps also from 2004. I think this is 24x24 inches. I used a sponge for this one. Click on the right column on the name Cat Power and see 28 posts over the years that featured a painting of her.

Cat Power, oil on canvas, ± 24"x24", c. 2004

I do know where the next one is though, it's in a box that houses the Top 100 2002.I dragged it out recently because the name came up in conversation. Jad Fair seems to be well connected to the art world. The painting was an illustration for a Half Japanese song.

Jad Fair, 9"x5", acrylic on wood, c. 2003

Eilish!

 

Billie Eilish

I painted Billie Eilish today. There is context as to why, but I leave it at mentioning that her song Happier Than Ever, performed on SNL right before her twentieth birthday in 2021, is actually pretty bloody awesome. I made some alterations to my Carla Bley painting from last week too.

Carla Bley

IM: Carla Bley

Carla Bley, oil on canvas, 2023

Carla Bley died less than a week ago. Several websites I frequent, because of a similarity of musical preferences, dedicated space in her memory. I had never really listened to her music because, one day, maybe thirty years ago, I decided I didn't like it. I was so wrong, then. I might have been a bit of a misogynist, then too. I painted her right away, the first oil for the Top 100 2023. I have now rejected the plan to make a stencil print in an edition of five for all 100, yet I still like the stencil and I have not totally abandoned the concept. I did trace the Bley painting and cut a stencil. These are charming things and I will do something with these at some point.

Thus far the stencils have worked better integrated into larger wholes, than as individual prints. Below the stencil for Mary Sivurapik was used on a pillar outside my studio. The stencil print of Sivurapik, an Inuit throat singer, is below that one.

 

Mary Sivurapik, stencil print, 12 x 18 inches

The stencil I cut for Sun Ra also looks better in a large mural created in the classroom with a couple of students then it does as a print.

Sun Ra

"239" Sun Ra inserted in collaborative mural, stencils and spray paint on wall

 

Top 100 2023

 

Ashaninka (Campa) Indian, print, a/p, 18x12 each

While the Top 100 2022 is up at the Top 100 Archive & Studio gallery, I'm experimenting with stencils and hope to come up with a concept for the Top 100 2023. I've been working with stencils a lot lately and I feel like creating the top 100 as an edition this year. The stencils could then also function to paint the full Top 100 as a mural, I don't know. It may be too ambitious to create 100 matrices (stencils) but I'll keep experimenting and thinking until I have a solid concept. A recording of a group of Campa women resides at #1 in the current top 100 for the time being. If I were to use this print, I probably dedicate to a recording made by Gerald Weiss in 1963 of a female Ashaninka solo voice, that is also in the list. I've painted the image before. I now learned that Ashaninka and Campa are the same people living in Peru in the Upper Amazon border region with Brazil.

Breuker, Branca, and Young

Willem Breuker; Glenn Branca; La Monte Young

Breuker, Branca, and Young, numbers 13, 16, and 17 in the list of musicians for the year 2022. None are in the Top 100 (but all have been painted before.) Lots of negative space that begs for writing. I will sign it but I'll leave the writing to someone else.

Giovanna Daffini/Giovanna Marini

The second to last one for the top 100 2022 is a preview of 2023. Both Giovannas are in the Top 100 2023. I bought records of both performers while in Italy: Bella Ciao!

Marion Coutts/Gert-Jan Blom

Marion Coutts is a British sculptor, Gert-Jan Blom a Dutch musician and sound technician. Both played in the Dog Faced Hermans.


 

Wrapping up

Eva Rune/Jennie Tiderman Österberg

The Top 100 2022 paintings are nearly completed. The concept of the series of 100 paintings doesn't allow me to repeat individuals and everybody who needed to get painted had already been painted. For the last few paintings I am resorting to musicians who are listed in secondary lists such as the top 20 musicians, or the top 25 albums, or, like for the painting above, the 20 highest scoring musical traditions (field recordings.) Swedish kulning recordings were number 18 on that list, but not a single recording made it into the regular top 100. The 24 kulning points were neatly divided between two historical recordings (by Erin Lisslass and Karin Edvards-Johansson) and two contemporary ones (Eva Rune and Jennie Tiderman-Österberg.)

Badume's Band: Rudy Blas, Olivier Guénégo, Antonin Volson

Badume's Band is the band behind three separate songs in the list by Selamnesh Zéméné, my favorite concert of 2022. It is time to set a date for the exhibition of the 100 paintings.

 

Renaissance

Konstantin Simonovitch/Abbé Jean Revert

A friend asked me if my trip to Florence, Italy had an immediate impact on my painting practice. The influence will only be felt next year, when a number of tunes from records I bought in Florence will be listed in, and painted for, the Top 100 2023. I'm still working on the Top 100 2022, even though I had it nearly finished before I left for Florence a month ago. I had not been in Florence before, and of course, seeing these works that I've known for years from books for real did make an impact. No surprise here: portraiture is my favorite subject matter of the old masters. In portraiture, especially, the real makes a difference compared with a reproduction. The portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo did not disappoint, portraits by Titian were to me a great revelation, but to say that I now want to paint like them, no. I have seen a hundred and fifty years of photography history, and I have seen Warhol, Orlan, and Lucian Freud. If any technical matter influenced me it's from an analysis of painting in the Renaissance in a book I've read before flying over; the use of complementary colors as a ground before applying the final color. I kind of knew about but never experimented with it, until the above painting relating to music by Iannis Xenakis. The painting clearly does not have a finished look but I decided it had to be this way. Konstantin Simonovitch and Abbé Jean Revert direct the orchestra and choir respectively on a recording of Polla ta Dhina, a composition by Iannis Xenakis. Simonovitch, further more, directs the Ensemble Instrumental De Musique Contemporaine on Akrata, another Top 100 entry from the same album as Polla ta Dhina. The Simonovitch/Revert painting was the first one I painted since returning from Florence, but I also finished one of the Kirk family illustrating yet another Rahsaan Roland Kirk tune in the list of 100 recordings compiled in 2022. Dothaan Kirk was Roland Kirk's wife, Rory, their son, and Alena a granddaughter.

Rory, Alena, and Dorthaan Kirk

 

Do Souls Multiply?

Rosalia Martinez/Shuar woman (after Luzuy)

Every twentieth or thirtieth painting or so I feel like I'm painting someone I know other than the one who is actually being painted. It happened in this painting while working on the portrait of Rosalia Martinez; all the way down the start of the process I felt like I was painting someone who once was a student in a drawing class of mine. The Shuar woman on the right does not feel like anyone I know but last year, when painting another Shuar woman, also photographed by Philippe Luzuy and published in Visages de Bronze, she continued to have the spirit of the neighbor of a friend. This then leads me to a novel conclusion that there are about 400 thousand different souls in the world. It is also a novel explanation for a mystery that I have been wondering about: If reincarnation is real, how is it possible then that there are so many more people alive today then there were, say, a thousand years ago. In other words: Do souls multiply?

All kidding aside; Rosalia Martinez wrote the commentary on the CD Les voix du monde, une anthologie des expressions vocales for a recording by Philippe Luzuy called "ujaj", a track that was listed in a top 100 numerous times. As it was before, I had to be inventive to find appropriate images. Last year I ended up painting Jean Rouch together with that Shuar woman who looked like the neighbor. Jean Rouch, as it turned out, had harassed women and would have faced consequences today in the years since the me-too movement. Philippe Luzuy had extensively worked for Jean Rouch. An option I had this year was to paint Paul Morand, who wrote the introduction to Visages de Bronze, but I quickly realized that Morand had even a worse civil record than Rouch did. Paul Morand was a Nazi collaborator during the second world war. I never have been able to find a photo of Luzuy himself yet.

Monkeys

Cebus and Spider Monkey from the Amazon Rainforest

Top 100 2022, #52: Kayabí: Animal and Bird Imitations from the album Music from Mato Grosso, Brazil, recorded by Edward M. Weyer, Jr, 1954, Folkways Records. Two men perform imitations of an uru, a quail like bird, urutao, a poor-me-one bird, a saki monkey, a spider monkey, a giant otter, a cebus monkey, and a sclater's curassow. Neither liner notes or Google searches have any images of the two (or any) Kayabí performers or Edward Weyer, hence the opportunity for me to paint animals. 

Are animal sounds music? Are animal imitations music? Are human imitations of animal sounds more music than that of the animals themselves?
 

Try it again!

Andrea Quispe Chura/John Cohen, 2023

Andrea Quispe Chura/John Cohen, 2021

Cover of Music of Thailand/Howard Kaufman, 2023

Cover of Music of Thailand/Howard Kaufman, 2021

I'm onto the last dozen paintings for the Top 100 2022, and it gets harder to find appropriate images. Unlike last year it isn't simply one painting per one song now, but a more flexible concept. The two latest paintings are from the same source images I had used last year to illustrate the same songs that recur this year from Music of Thailand, and Mountain Music of Peru. Both double portraits illustrate well the concept I used for the Top 100 2021; that of the juxtaposition of the recorded with the recorder, and, in this case too, the photographed and photographer. The indigenous tribal person and the western academic. I don't know if I like the new paintings better or worse, what do you think?

No outography!

Nico/John Cale

The painting of Nico and Cale sure looks like it was intended as an outography, but it's not. The painting was intended as a double portrait, with both their shadows moving across the halfway mark, as I had done in 2007 with a double portrait of the White Stripes. The two black shapes representing Nico and Cale were not cut away but rather added. It's more of a stereoscopic image than an outograph. The source was a photo of the two with Brian Eno and Kevin Ayers. The quartet had collaborated on June 1, 1974, from which album Baby's on Fire, by Eno, once was my number 1. But this was a long, long, time ago. The year 2022 features Nico's Secret Side in its top 100. Secret Side comes from Nico's solo album The End... and was produced by John Cale also in 1974.

Since I'm at I might as well forward some other painting I finished over the last two months. There are about eighteen I did not (yet) write about in these pages. I made a series of three double portrait paintings representing four songs from the CD series Siberie on Music du Monde. Three from Volume 4: Kamchatka: Tambours de danse de l'extreme-orient Siberien, and one from Volume 8: Chants rituels des nomades de la Taiga. Two of these paintings, featuring Ivikovna Sajnav with Henri Lecomte, and Anna Vasilevna Kolegova with Irina Khristoforovna Kolegova, I had already done some months ago using images I had used before in earlier versions of the Top 100. I had ordered the the Volume 8 CD from a seller in Switzerland which took forever to make it to my house. I ordered the CD mainly because I needed images. No images of any of the singers in the series can be found on-line the the CD booklets contain several. I knew I would be waiting to post about the first two paintings until I was able to do the third. The singer in the Top 100 from Volume 8 is Uljana Nikoraevna Vasilova. A photograph of Vasilova was not included in the booklet but several others were, including Oktjabrina Vladimirovna Naumova, who had been in a Top 100 several times, and really was due for a painting. She is paired with Alexandra Lavrillier, who assisted Lecomte, and recorded about half the tracks on the CD.

Alexandra Lavrillier/Oktjabrina Vladimirovna Naumova

Ikovna Sajnav/Henri Lecomte

Anna/Irina Kolegova

Woman with a Pearl Necklace (Flora)

Airto (Moreira)/Flora Purim

Some of the most iconic work from art history is portraiture. The painted sculpture bust of Nefertiti by one of the first artists we know by name: Thutmose; the Egyptian Roman Era Fayum mummy portraits of the first and second centuries; the Mona Lisa; Girl with a Pearl Earring; self-portraits by Rembrandt and van Gogh; old master portraits like those by Goya; new master portraits by Alice Neel; Lucian Freud; and so many others, make portraiture a most important genre in the history of art. Sometimes a single portrait of art history is a conscious reference for one of my Top 100 paintings, but more often a host of unconscious references pass the revue while working on a portrait. What I have available to me, unlike historical artists, is photography in combination with the internet. I have access to pretty much every face of every individual out there in the world. For this portrait of a married couple: Airto Moreira and Flora Purim, I didn't need the internet. Their portraits appear, as photographs, on the back of the LP: The Essential Airto, featuring Flora Purim. [Buddah, 1976] There are five portraits on the back, all tightly framed in on oval. Hermeto (Pascoal), Ron Carter, and Sivuca, appear next to Purim and Airto. I've been playing that record a few times and the portrait of especially Purim kept staring at me. I needed to paint her, even though my favorite song from the album, Andei (I Walked), did not quite have enough points to be included in the Top 100 2022.

 

FC Weiland

Frits Weiland/Karel Appel

Poeme Barbare is like the art of Karel Appel; agressive, intense, uncompromising, and Dutch. I can relate to some of these characteristics. Frits Weiland is a Dutch composer and sound artist, who assists Karel Appel on the LP Musique Barbare. The filmmaker Jan Vrijman, and photographer Ed van der Elsken documented the making of it.

Leon Williams/Sarah Webster Fabio

Sarah Webster Fabio is an American poet who recorded several collections of poetry with a musical background. Chromo is from the LP Jujus/Alchemy of the Blues. [Folkways, 1976] The musicians on the record are some of the children of Webster Fabio and some of their friends. They called themselves "Don't Fight the Feeling" for the occasion. The band is led by an experienced and professional jazz musician: Leon Williams.

Alan Vega/Alex Chilton

Fat City is the eight-and-a-half minute opening track from the LP Cubist Blues [2.13.61, 1996] by Alan Vega, together with Alex Chilton and Ben Vaughn. Alan Vega is best known for his work with Martin Rev in Suicide, but not not so much as a solo act, even though he recorded a large string of albums. Both Chilton and Vega have been in the Top 100 several times with their respected bands Big Star, and Suicide.


 

The Glitch

There is such a thing as glitch art. It consists of willfully manipulating a computer as to cause image processing errors. My 1997 graduation thesis was called Painting in the Digital Era in which I explored how a computer interprets visual data. Within my experiments I was especially interested in the so-called 'glitches' that happened when data were interpreted differently from my expectations. Whimsically I concluded that there were forces at work inside the machine that were unintended by the creators of them. Those forces were perhaps archaic structures that could be found anywhere in nature and in the products created by nature, including humans, something like Turing patterns or fractals. The thesis was a text supporting various paintings and digital art works I created at the time. The paintings were a reversal of the pattern of digital image processing programs (such as photoshop) that are based on the history of image processing (graphic design) of the material world. I'm interested in the glitches of a computer handling images, more so than the willfully manipulating of it for aesthetic pleasure, although I recognize how people are drawn in by these glitches and want to control them. They are beautiful in a way that the outcome of surrealist games are beautiful, and any result of chance operations are beautiful, exactly because they're unexpected. The unexpected will delight anyone.

Stanley Diamond/Anaguta drummer

Above is one result of my experiments with this concept. It's done with a little hesitance. I've done a few others with results that did not satisfy me. That's the problem of the glitch; it doesn't always do what you want it to do. The machine is in nature formal, it acts on forms rather than ideas. The opposite of formal is not informal (in art) but content. Form and content, the ingredients of an artwork. When I try to impersonate a machine, I obviously can't be 100% objective (formal.) The argument is here that the machine isn't 100% formal either. Stanley Diamond, btw, is an important anthropologist. Surprisingly there aren't many pictures on line, so I used the same as last year, illustrating a song that was there last year too: Women with mortar and pestle, a recording of Nigerian Anaguta women. On the LP Music of the Jos Plateau and Other Regions of Nigeria, the track is coupled with Two Anaguta drummers. Olga Diamond (love that name) took a photograph during the performance, on which I based the musician on the right.

An Armenian Case

Adrina Otero/Zabelle Panosian

Zabelle Panosian was a Armenian-American soprano born in Turkey in 1891. She recorded eleven songs in 1917 and 1918 that have recently been reissued together with a book titled I am a Servant of Your Voice. The CD has 21 tracks, I don't own it (just bought the one track in my Top 100, Groung, from bandcamp), which means the authors probably found some alternate takes from the Colombia sessions. The song Groung (meaning 'crane') is reputedly a secret song more than 400 years old and sounds truly mesmerizing. Zabelle Panosian, the Armenian refugee from Turkey, continued through her long life (she died in 1986), supporting the Armenian case, and at the end of her life, left a significant amount to the Amenian-American community. The left half of the painting is modeled after a publication shot of the dancer/actress Adrina Otero, daughter of Zabelle Panosian. The image depicts her as a flamenco dancer. After a twenty year hiatus there is once again flamenco music in the Top 100 (see this post from a month ago.)
 

I.M. Gal Costa

Caetano Veloso/Gal Costa

Gal Costa died just a few months ago at the age of 77 in Sao Paulo. I only learned about it a week ago when preparing for this painting and updating my archive. Back in my old radio days in the Netherlands I used to know it quite fast when a musician had died, my friend Wim, once a year, in January, did a radio special playing music from musicians who had died that year. He kept a list all year, and of course I was being kept up to date. Not so much anymore, if it isn't news for the big media, I probably won't hear about it. I'm actually surprised the passing of Gal Costa was not newsworthy enough, as she had been an important figure in Brazilian, and world music. I had never painted her before and her Relance, a b-side of her hit Milho Verde, written by Caetano Veloso, is her first ever listing in a Top 100. Together with Veloso, Maria Bethania (Veloso's sister), Os Mutantes, and Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa formed the core of the Tropicalia movement in Brasil, a mix of bossa nova, samba, and rock 'n' roll. The version of Relance in my list is a live TV performance with the group Dumingunhos from 1970.
 

Positive Body Image

Janis Ian/Nina Simone

Janis Ian and Nina Simone were friends at some point. Then they fell out. Who knows what happened exactly but Simone was known to have a bad temper and was later diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. While in the process of finishing the above painting, I re-listened to Simone's cover of Ian's song Stars, and Maria, my spouse, commented "she must be on drugs." I never considered that and thought of the song, that Simone paired with the famous hit Feelings at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976, as a brilliant and intense performance. Maria was right though, towards the end of the 17 minute rendition, Simone herself alludes to drug use. A review on the Guardian confirms that Simone was sometimes incomprehensible and unsteady during the performance. Ian's original, from 1974, is a manifesto of what is called today "positive body image," as was her most famous hit At 17. The message spread by Ian and Simone had been analogous at times, and Simone acknowledges Ian in the performance by mentioning her name in the same breath with Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday.