Black is the Color...

Nina Simone
14 x 11 inches, various materials on paper, 2020

I'm starting to loose my mind here. Getting carried away copying a photograph: The one Wikipedia uses on their page dedicated to Nina Simone. Their photos are typically high resolution, with warts and all. The more precise you get the more glaring the mistakes. Just a sixteenth of an inch error on the placement of an eye for example changes the whole feel of a drawing and brings out the subjectivity of any drawing more clearly. So here's the first American song in the Top 100 2020 now presiding at number 9. Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair is a traditional ballad of Scottish origin and did become a sort of anthem for Nina Simone. She recorded the song numerous times and this year's version comes from Nina Simone at Town Hall. [Colpix, 1959] Even though the American presence in the Top 100 is steadily diminishing (due to a focus on field recordings of the world's indigenous people) during the last years of compiling these lists, the United States still easily provides the most entries per country. The US is on top of the statistics of the COVID-19 too, easily, with about a quarter of all cases reported, about the same amount as recordings in the Top 100 in recent years. Now the US is a huge country with an enormous population, so their numbers per capita are not that different from other countries in the industrialized world. North Carolina, the place of birth of Nina Simone, for example, compares with say Serbia. What I would like to note in the context of Nina Simone here is the disproportionate illness and death rate among African-American citizens. No politics here today from my keyboard. The epidemic is bad enough.