John Jacob Niles

John Jacob Niles
10.75" x 8.3"
oil on wood. 2010

For three weeks now –I'm a slow reader– I'm working on this book, a birthday present (thank you Anne), And They All Sang by Studs Terkel. The book is a compilation, a transcript of interviews Terkel conducted for the Chicago Public Radio over the course of roughly half a century. More than half the book deals with classical music, and if we learn anything from it is how great Caruso was and how well respected the maestro Arturo Toscanini. One can also not escape the idea that the older generation is skeptical about the younger. The rest of the book deals with popular styles such as jazz and folk. The preface of the book is an interview with John Jacob Niles, it bridges the two worlds of classical and popular, and is for me one of the highlights of the book. Niles came from a musical family and had a 'classical' training. He was sort of a musical 'wunderkind', wrote music when he was 13 years old. Niles has the most amazing falsetto (at least since the last castrato, and the only one to make records, Alessandro Moreschi died in 1922) I have ever heard. The name John Jacob Niles has always been a familiar one to me but I never had payed much attention. He was never in a Top 100 until this year, even though some of his songs like Black is the Color, I Wonder as I Wander, and Go 'Way From My Window have been standard Top 100 fare when performed by others.
John Jacob Niles is an amazingly strange character. A writer as well as a singer, a scholar, a musical anthropologist, an instrument maker, folklorist and aristocrat, Niles, with so many talents, was a true renaissance man. I'm certainly envious. My talents are limited and my pitch is far from perfect. I had to give up my musical career at a very early stage, I would have stuck with music if I had it in me. I love music and with this project I think I've found a niche to be something like a musician, a musicians' painter. It's a relatively new development as I used to be an artists' artist. Painting big ideas on a large scale. I didn't have the bigness in my character to sustain those big ideas, the ego, the confidence, the discipline, the ambition. I did all right but it just wasn't mine to sustain. With the Top 100 I have found a sustainable project. Based on hobby rather than intellect, I've been doing it practically all my life.

M.I.A.

M.I.A.
24" x 16"
oil behind plexiglass, 2010

After Mia Zapata (see previous...) M.I.A. is the next singer to re-appear in the Top 100. I used the same image as I painted last year but it illustrates a different song. Born Free, built around a sample of Suicide's Ghost Rider (the original track appeared twice in previous Top 100 lists), is from her brand new CD Maya but I found it on a compilation CD tucked in the Believer: 2010 Music Issue magazine. Born Free, according to the editors of Believer, is "a way of acknowledging her growing hipster audience", of which I am apparently one. The commentary in the magazine is a political one, be it not about Tamil liberation, but about cultural identity. My head is spinning trying to convey the message. In my notes to last year's painting I commented on my inability to take a political stance and now, after reading, and listening to, so many more opinions about M.I.A. (everybody seems to have one), I'm even less opinionated. I stick to my little "I believe in her integrity" disclaimer I used last year. Being engaged in a discussion on M.I.A. recently, people questioned this integrity. I could not defend her well theoretically, but when I asked if Born Free wasn't the most exciting new music around, they had to admit it was.
The painting, reverse on glass, is an experiment. I've seen my wife Maria have wonderful results with the technique, and it seemed a good way to not have to sacrifice the original sketch, the under painting. Maria often tries to stop me from continuing to paint on certain paintings because the under painting is so lively. As it turns out she liked the back of the painting very much, one can never win...

...I can't resist to mention (again) that Maya Arulpragasam (her real name) shares July 18 as a birthday with me as well as with the Norwegian extreme right-wing politician Vidkun Quisling (for him I would like to refer you to an April entry on Varg Vikernes: Varg and Me).

One last thing: If you spotted that M.I.A.'s legs in the painting are proportionally a little short —good eyes. This time it is not because of my shortcomings as a painter but it is due to my lousy photography skills (or a shitty camera).

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Mia Zapata
7.5" x 7.5"
watercolor on paper, 2009

Summer 2010: a brief membership of NetFlix:: Go to instant availability, type music documentaries for your category, scroll 'till you see the title The Gits pop up, and then hit the play button on your screen. First you'll have 45 minutes of awe, then 45 minutes of tears, guaranteed. The Gits will be back in the Top 100 after they were last year a most pivotal musical entry for me. The image above belongs to the Top 100 2009, so I'll have to paint another image. It certainly will be another portrait of their singer Mia Zapata. The text below also belongs to the Top 100 2009. I feel the content even more severely than I did last year. Watch the video and become a better person, we owe it to Mia Zapata.

When a song enters the Top 100 list I often seek out its history, and that of the musicians behind it. As the music touched me one way or another, often the biographies of the musicians or history of a song do that as well. This was certainly the case with the Gits. As I looked for some background to the song While You're Twisting, I'm Still Breathing I came across the tragic story of Mia Zapata, who wrote and sang it. She was 27 in 1993 when she was brutally raped and murdered on the streets of her hometown of Seattle. She and her band had come from Dayton, Ohio, and had only released one album while on the brink of making it big. The aftermath of the crime is as inspiring as her death was horrific. The remaining members of the band, together with luminaries from the Seattle Grunge and Riot Grrl scenes, worked together for many long years to fund the crime investigation for the murder (which was finally resolved in 2003) and a foundation in Mia’s memory. That organization Home Alive exists to this day and teaches women’s defense against predators as well as providing care for victims of sex crimes. Reading the story of Mia Zapata I am filled with grief and I resent that I, throughout the history of my Top 100, have objectified women. I realize I wanted to paint breasts more than that I was interested in their personal and artistic history. Hereby I vow that I will treat each and every person I paint with the respect a person deserves. It’s the year of vows anyway. On my 45th birthday I decided I would be a grown up: responsible, confident, and disciplined.

David Allen Coe

David Allen Coe
5" x 6"
ink and pencil on paper

The second in the mini series on sex and music is dedicated to the country singer David Allen Coe. I'd strongly recommend an interview by Al Goldstein for Midnight Blue that can be found on YouTube. It's the most memorable, uncanny interview I've heard in years. Al Goldstein is a fan and a match for Coe's rawness of speech, he comes out strong: "You're a fucking degenerate". Coe's response is to lol (I don't mean lots of love). Coe uses the 'f' word quite a bit (he also uses the 'n' word quite a bit too, but I leave that topic for some other time.) "Sometimes there's no other word to express what I mean" says Coe later in the interview. Coe didn't have an easy life, abandoned by his parents he's been in institutions for more than twenty years since he was nine, on dead row in Ohio for killing a fellow inmate who demanded oral sex. It left him scattered and full of hate, hate towards women, negros, but not towards homosexuals. While not being gay he continues to express warm feelings towards homosexuals, in fact the interview opens with Coe performing Fuck Anita Bryant (an anti-gay rights spokesperson). Being in prison for so long made him tough but it also meant for him that the only tenderness and intimacy he experienced was with men. In the interview he explains he was a virgin until the age of 27 when he had "his first piece of ass". Intimacy with another man is a normal thing in many societies where contact with girls outside marriage is taboo. When I visited India I really had to get used to the custom that men like to touch other men. Unlike David Allen Coe I found comfort and warmth with women when I grew up, and my object of adoration was breasts. David Allen Coe is not interested in big breasts, he prefers a nice ass. Without a blush he states that sexual attraction, when he grew up, was focused on a nice (man's) ass. Coe now lives with six women and, according to him, his attitude towards women has greatly improved. In the interview Coe is totally upfront and detailed about his sexual experiences. In his songs he doesn't shy away from sexual detail either, some of these songs are collected on the album 18 X-Rated Songs from which Cum Stains on My Pillow was featured in my Top 100 2008. Even though his songs are largely autobiographical, the experiences are much less of prowess than the songs suggest . The country star David Allen Coe is a character invented by, and based on the life of, David Allen Coe. You got to admire one's quest to become free after a life of hate and rejection.

Sex and Music

Noelia
3” x 4”
pencil on paper, 2010

Over the next few days I’ll post a series of observations concerning topics I usually shy away from but never escape from. I’ve seen videos; two documentaries, an interview, a home made tape, and I’m reading a book as well, all having to do with these topics, and with music, and therefore with my Top 100, and thus myself. The topics that kept my mind thinking were sex, hate, violence, love, and abuse. I’ll start at the beginning: sex, present in all the above mentioned topics as well as in everyone to roam this planet (and beyond, maybe?)

Breasts have been a favorite subject of mine to paint (more about breasts in a following post on David Allen Coe) but last year I made the vow not to paint breasts gratuitously anymore (in the context of the Top 100.) As part of me becoming a responsible adult I would treat the (female) performers respectfully. I was prompted to make this vow after learning the tragic fate of the singer Mia Zapata (more about her as well in this mini-series over the next few days.) I’m sticking to the vow. It is not that I gave up having crushes on certain performers and that I don’t look at sexy pictures of them, but I’m not adding any more disrespectful images, I’ll keep the sexual element private. The paintings are still very sexy, I think, just as the music is. One of the reasons I want to bring up the subject of sex here is a video I saw with the Latin pop superstar Noelia, a sex-tape. I had never heard of Noelia and it’s rather sad that I learned of this singer through a sex video I came across on the web by chance. The video shows Noelia having sex with a man who is not seen (save for his penis) but who is the rapper Yamil. The video, in my mind, is not pornographic, it is made very lovingly and the expression on Noelia’s face is that of happiness and comfort. It is a private video that shouldn’t have been distributed. The aftermath of the distribution is messy, to say the least. Noelia has been involved in court battles and scandals ever since. Since the video I watched several performances of Noelia on YouTube and I like it a little bit but am mostly appalled by the commercialism of it. The production is super pop and disco mediocrity. It’s not all that bad though; the songs (mostly written by herself) are strong and catchy. None of these over-produced video’s portray Noelia in such a humanly, kind, and loving way as the sex-tape does. It’s a pity. Really. It’s a condition of human culture (not nature) that the most true and beautiful depictions of human being (and I don’t mean sex here) languish and are substituted for a superficial reality. I hate to admit it but I think that the sex-tape is art and her hits (like Candela) are not. What I want is to see a home made tape of her performing her songs in the coziness of her home. Her full name is Noelia Lorenzo Monge, she lives in Puerto Rico and was also born there on August 31, 1979. The drawing presented here is from a notebook, done from the sex-tape, very small. The actual drawing extends further down (but not below the belt) but I cropped it right above her nipples, a vow is a vow!

Top 100 2009 at Country Club

Gaahl of Trelldom
left: 10.5" x 8"
oil on wood, spray paint,
2010
right:
10.25" x 7"
oil on wood, 2009

From 2010 back to the Top 100 2009 for a moment: August 13, 2010 will mark the opening of the second showing of the Top 100 2009 exhibition. It will coincide with the publication of the catalog for it. This will take place at Country Club Projects in Cincinnati. The publisher of the catalog is Iconoclast, affiliated with the Country Club Projects gallery. Several pieces of the Top 100 2009 have been sold and of those I only have a color copy available. A gallery, of course, doesn't like to show reproductions but wants originals. So I've started to paint new versions of the 'missing' pieces. First I painted a few that will most likely become part of the Top 100 2010 and for the upcoming exhibition I will label these paintings as being '2010'. Next (if I get to it) I will paint new versions of others, that I then simply will call Top 100 2009, 2nd version. Depicted above on the right is Gaahl from the band Trelldom, last year's #1. Next to it on the left is a brand new painting that could be both a second version for the Top 100 2009, as well as a new Top 100 2010 painting, if Trelldom makes it into the list again. The catalog version of the Top 100 2009 will feature the original version while for the exhibition Country Club will show the new version. Try to come August 13, 2010 to Country Club Projects in Cincinnati, and spread the word around. The catalog will also be available through Country Club.

Heartlandtruckstop

Beth Orton
11' x 7.25"
oil on wood, 2010

During my time off work I undertook several road trips. Driving long distance is great for music listening. The best music for driving is popular music, with the occasional sing-along hit. It so happened that not too long ago I purchased a whole stack of popular music from the discard bin at the library. The problem often, with popular CDs is that besides the hit song the rest of the CD is hardly worth listening to. In the old days of popular music the artists went into the studio to record but a few tracks, singles. A whole album, more than an hour, is often too much for a band, any band to be able to hold my attention. Usually I'm done with listening to a CD after about three songs (the best song is often the first track). The notable exception from the recent stack of CDs is Comfort of Strangers by Beth Orton. It is one of those albums that you can play over and over again and it only gets better. I have a history liking the songs of a certain female singer-songwriters; in the last decade there have been one or two albums each year that I played many, many times (something I don't usually do). The Beth Orton CD, purchased for only a dollar is bound to be one of this year's top albums as I listened to it more than any other album thus far. Heartlandtruckstop is the first song from the CD to be included in the Top 100 2010 and several others are close behind. I just got done with the first painting of her and I'm looking forward to painting two or three more. The following list represent ten albums from singer-songwriters that yielded multiple songs in a Top 100 of recent years. The list is in no particular order.

• Cat Power - You Are Free
• Alela Diane - To Be Still
• Lucinda Williams - Essence
• Jolie Holland - Springtime Can Kill You
• Joni Mitchell - Blue
• Jessica Lea Mayfield - Blasphemy, So Heartfelt
• Beth Orton - Comfort of Strangers
• Cat Power - The Greatest
• Jolie Holland - Escondida
• Marianne Faithfull - Before the Poison
  

Ca Trù performance

Musicians performing Ca Trù
16" x 12"
oil on wood, 2010

Yay, vacation! Finally time to watch the World Cup, but there ain't many games left: Holland is in the final, yay! After two games last weekend and a lot of sleeping I started right back into those paintings again, and music too. It took a while but the twentieth top 10 for the music year 2010 is written down. This particular top 10 reflects my inclination towards collecting field recordings from all over the world. The first place I look at in a record store is the used vinyl world music section. Last Sunday I ended up buying three used CDs and an LP from Jamaica/UK, Papua New Guinea, Peru, and India. Slowly this part of my collection is becoming interesting and bulky. I organize these geographically.

I promised to forward herein every tenth top 10, so here's the twentieth:

1. Mohanlal Rayani – Rãg Mãdh, Tãl Kharwa
   
2. Ca Trù performance (anon.), North Vietnam
3. Michael Hurley - Girl on the Billboard
   
4. Coralie Clément – Avec Ou Sans Moi
5. Massar Egbari featuring Donia Massoud – Wailing song
6. Melchior Bances y Pastoras – Pastoras de Mórrope
7. Gania and Famu – Funerary song weep
8. Pierre Henry – Psyché Rock
9. David Allen Coe - The Perfect Country and Western Song
10. Geechie Wiley – Last Kind Words Blues

The Melchior Bances tune comes from Traditional Music of Peru 4: Lambayeque. I wrote in one of the commentaries to last years Top 100 that I would buy every year one volume of the series, this is keeping my word (seven more years to go). The Geechie Wiley, #1 in the Top 100 1999, appeared in a dream. Gania and Famu come from a three CD set dedicated to the music of the Bosavi rain forest in Papua New Guinea, it belongs to my mini collection of weep singing. Coralie Clément I heard on NPR. My stepson Emil played David Allen Coe for me. The Michael Hurley is from a wonderful zine called PRISM index, compiled by a friend (Jeffrey Bowers, check it out: PRISMindex.com). Rayani is from the LP Hindustani: A Panorama of North indian Music. Yay, vacation is going to be great!

Sung Poetry of North Vietnam

Performer in Unesco documentary on Ca Trú
10" x 7.5"
pencil on paper, 2010

Top 100 updates: Spring and Summer remain slow. Soundtrack this past month are vuvuzelas, the most annoying instrument on earth. My least favorites instruments used to be Scottish pipes and Peruvian pan flutes but both I've grown to like and have been represented in past Top 100s. I don't think the vuvuzela will ever make it but the Dutch perform well in the World Cup so far and I continue to listen to this annoying instrument. I know people that really love the sounds (of traffic and such) of the big city, and according to the performer the Lord Buckley, the spinning wheel was Mahatma Gandhi's favorite instrument of all India.

I didn't paint for two weeks but today, a nice hot and quiet Sunday, I worked with this image of a Vietnamese performer of Ca Trú, a traditional form of sung poetry. The image comes from a video documentary on the subject published by Unesco. First I tried ink, then I used markers, and on this third one I only used a pencil. I intend to make a painting and the drawing above is a sketch for it. Usually I don't make a separate sketch for a painting but the image, I think, demands it this time. The traditional sung poetry of North Vietnam is a very strict art form. The performance is subject to many regulations. So many that the performances are completely devoid of emotion, sexuality, and spontaneity. The resulting sound (as well as the visual presence of the performers) is delicate, airy, eerie, frail, and contains a strange sense of beauty. The tradition is 900 years old, threatened with extinction, but protected by the cultural authorities, and well recorded. I felt that while drawing the female singer, who also plays a simple percussion instrument, I needed to take very good care of depicting the subtleties of expression and pose. Like the music in which beauty is derived from strict regulations the painting to be also should be executed with the utmost technical preparations. "When singing her mouth should not be opened so widely" is one of the restrictions imposed on the singer. I'm going to paint an image of Ca Trú and I won't open my mouth.

One of the most interesting anecdotes from the world of ethnomusicology I've come across, comes from the great Alan Lomax, who observed that more restricted social mores and behaviors of a society result in a more nasal style of singing. I'm going to paint this image of Ca Trú in falsetto, in a minor key. Where is the pain in painting?

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Darkthrone
23.5" x 12"
oil on wood, 2010

A slow season in Top 100 world, it's summer, there's a world cup going on, there's my job at the gallery. Unexpectedly a new exhibition was scheduled when it should have been the slow season. Too busy, can't even watch the world cup games because they are played at times when I have to work. I've seen just a few minutes here and there, 15 minutes Brazil, 10 minutes Japan, I didn't see Portugal at all. I got up early this morning to see if the New Zealand team would perform the haka (see April post: Sports and Music) but they didn't. Doom and gloom all over. Haven't been in my studio much, hardly made any Top 10s, hardly found any new music to listen to. To catch up on making a painting for music that already secured a Top 100 2010 spot, I painted this Darkthrone. Last year I used the same image (from a photo by Peter Beste) but painted the two Darkthrone members, Fenriz and Nocturno Culto separate. My composition compared to Peter Beste's is cropped and that's my favorite part of it. I don't know why I did it (I never crop my figures) but I like it. I tell my students that if you work on a painting or drawing and a crazy impulsive idea comes to your mind, to never reject that idea but to explore it. That idea is your unconscious telling you how to make the work worthwhile. I also tell my students that they shouldn't think too much about what they are doing. Thinking about a crazy impulsive idea for sure ends into a rejection of it. I proudly tell them that this is probably the only class they will encounter in college in which the teacher discourages thinking. Descartes turned inside out, "I wish I was a mole in the ground, so I could root that mountain down".

Bob Marley

Bob Marley
12" x 10"
oil on wood, 2010

I'm a fan of football, I go crazy for it. I played as a kid, I played as an adult, I watch it whenever I can. In five days the world cup starts and I'm getting really nervous. It could be the year that the team I'm rooting for –our national team, the Dutch that is– will become the next world champions. Yesterday the team (and me too for that matter) suffered a major setback in its bid though, as their star player Arjen Robben suffered an injury and most likely will miss out on the entire competition. I wanted to paint a football picture. In the late eighties I painted a lot of football pictures, my first solo exhibition was filled with depictions of my football heroes. But then I started to paint my music heroes. Both topics are driven by fan obsession but there is a big difference: The music paintings are a celebration of the human mind whereas the football paintings celebrated the body. The Wexner Center for the Arts, the #1 venue for contemporary art in this city, just organized the exhibition Hard Bodies, all about that celebration, all about masculinity. I'm not interested in a celebration of masculinity, I can appreciate a good play but I don't care for the aesthetics of it and even less for the player's good looks. I teach figure drawing to art students which is also purely about the body but not so much about masculinity. Most models are very feminine (and very beautiful) as a matter of fact.

The only picture of a musical hero playing football I know of is of Bob Marley. Bob Marley was a football fanatic and friend of Jamaica's biggest football star of the 70s Allen Cole (who was kicked off his last team for wearing dreadlocks). Convenience will have it that after seven years of absence Bob Marley is back in the Top 100 list. My wife Maria pulled this old tape I recorded for her twelve years ago, out of the drawer and played it many times. My (and her as well) favorite Bob Marley song these days is also the most spiritual from the African Herbsmen album on that tape: Put it On. "I rule my destiny. Oh Lord I thank you."

Blooddawn

Donn of Blooddawn
11" x 8.5"
ink and acrylic on paper, 2010

In black metal circles Blooddawn is best known as a song by the Swedish band Marduk. The word comes from a role playing game situated in Earth’s Second Dark Age. The players are prophets send to the blasted ruins of Earth. No wonder the term is popular among black metal bands. The bands Redrum and Lut’ also have songs with that title (they may be covers of the Marduk song, I don’t know), and there are several bands named Blooddawn: A trash metal band from Germany, black metal bands from Brazil and the UK, and there is a death metal band called Blood By Dawn. The British band is from Newcastle upon Tyne in the Northeast. Donn and P are their members, and their song Nailed Fist is found on the cd accompanying the only metal magazine I have: Zero Tolerance (#33), the same magazine I found Vampyre Corpse in. I don’t know what it is about black metal images that makes me pull out my sketchbook and draw with black ink (rather than my usual oil on wood.) Maybe I do know what it is about black metal but am too embarrassed to tell.