COVID

Melakhan Langa, narh flute
11x14 inches, pencil, watercolor, flowers on paper, 2020

The Top 100 2020 series is nicknamed the COVID-19 series. This happened because when I started the series the country was under a lockdown order and people were asked to stay home because of the virus. I thought it was appropriate to make works at our living room table rather than my usual easel paintings done in the studio. To sit down and meticulously draw a picture seemed to capture the spirit of the time for for me. Then I also started to add the COVID-19 stats for the various regions the songs originated in. In that same spirit I felt the need the other day to not only make a meticulously detailed portrait of a musician but also to add flowers to it in a typical low-art-household-watercolor fashion. The wildflowers in our yard give me great joy and before I set out to photograph my drawing I decided to stick some actual flowers to the surface. The result represents for me more than any other the spirit of COVID-19. The drawing will probably look a bit more weathered tomorrow as it does in the photo (not to mention three weeks from now.) It so happened that this drawing was made on the very last blank page remaining in my sketchbook. All 27 works thus far in the Top 100 2020 are still attached to this sketchbook. I have purchased an identical book to continue the series and this full one now I could lay away with some weights on top. I wait a few weeks before I check how the flowers fared during their drying process.  

A bit about the music illustrated: The recording in the top 100 list is Flûte narh avec bourdon vocal and appears on Les voix de monde, une anthologie des expressions vocales published in 1996 by Hugo Zemp. The recording was made by Geneviève Dournon in 1993 in Rajasthan, India. The instrument used is the narh flute, cut from a kane called kar. The performer is Sherha Mahamad who belongs to the Islamic ethnic minority of Sindhi Sipahi. A vocal drone accompanies the way the flute is played. I did not have a picture so I searched for a substitute and learned some things about the flute, the tradition, and the people in the process. And I found a video of a man, Melakhan Langa, playing this flute. A beautiful video. The playing of the narh is yet another tradition in danger of dying out.