11 Paintings from 2025

More and more I tend to only paint from those photographs that in which I find some human truth, figures who appear to carry the weight of the world. Empathy is a matter of fact. Often I return to the same photographs that then become more than mere photographs; spirit visions from another world. The woman who graces the cover of Aboriginal Music of Australia, probably photographed by Alice Moyle who recorded the record around 1970, is not included on the CD re-release of the album now named: Australia: Aboriginal Music. I painted the image before in 2019, illustrating the same song, a type of Wu-unka song sung by Utekn and Yaimuk in the Wik-ngatara language in northern Queensland. The woman in the photograph could well be either Utekn or Yaimuk, since most other tracks on the record are sung by males.

The photograph used for the above painting comes from the booklet to the LP Indian Music of the Upper Amazon from 1954 on the Folkways label. The painting accompanies a Campa Mourning Ceremony recorded by Harold Courlander in Peru, but the image is captioned "Conibo dancers at animal sacrifice ceremony." I assume, the photograph was taken by Courlander. Here I separated two female dancers from a larger group, without whom the image become more magical. Both Campa (or Ashaninka) and the Conibo live in the Amazon basin in Peru.

David Toop (b. 1949) is an English musician (once a member of the Flying Lizards), author (contributor of The Wire, f.e.), and ethnomusicologist who recorded extensively among the Yanomamo in Ecuador.

The album: Lost Shadows: In Defence Of The Soul (Yanomami Shamanism, Songs, Ritual) is featured in the Top 100 twice, while another song, Flying Witch Music, from Papua New Guinea. from the BBC archives, at #3 in the Top 100 of 2024, was featured on one of his radio shows for the BBC.

The above is rather big painting (well, 30x30 inches isn't all that big) that I've adding to for almost two years. Originally the painting was one that I found in the stacks of the art room, left behind by a student, featuring Princess Leia of Star Wars, in a pose reminiscent of some Victorian portrait paintings. The painting had some obvious mistakes, that I, out of boredom, I guess, fixed. At the time I didn't know the Star Wars connection, as I never was interested in any of that. The main thing I had to fix was the skin tone of Leia, which looked awful; eventually the face was substituted by one of another skin color: Aida Victoria, a contemporary American blues singer. On the top left of the canvas I reproduced an image of Lady Maria Conyngham by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Central top is a remake of a painting by Pablo Picasso, a portrait of one of his lovers. I started adding, after Aida Victoria, other Top 100 2024 entries: The Static, a group around Glenn Branca, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, led by Lydia Lunch, and notably included James Chance on tenor saxophone.

Sun Ra appeared on a canvas that I had laying around to experiment with. The context again is my office hours as a professor of art at FSW. If no students attend these times dedicated to them I fill these hours with doing some painting myself in the classroom. Sun Ra has been the highest scoring musician from the Top 100 2024 and needed some extra exposure in the series of paintings. Three songs are in the list, Watusa is linked now to this painting, and it appeared in the movie Space is the Place. If you haven't seen it: Now's the time.

Again an image I used before: Two Ainu women performing the "Rekukara," the Japanese equivalent to the Canadian katajjait. The difference between the previous painting and the current one is that the Top 100 song is that it represents neither geographical location; A small but significant population of Ainu had settled in Kamchatka, the eastern most territory of the Soviet Union. The recording "rekukura examples" was made in Kamchatka, Russia; the two Ainu women performing a Rekukara is the oldest known of this kind, and was recorded in 1941. The painting was done on a 20x10 canvas reserved for the Top 100 20024. Half of the paintings in that series were done on this format. The next five images are painted on a 10x20 inch canvas.

Gidole, Ethiopia

Chrissie Hynde, Pretenders: For the first time since I started in 1983, the Pretenders are listed in a Top 100: Message of Love.

This is the first instance of me painting a work of folk art as a substitute for a track of which a more appropriate image could not be found. This is the cover of: Kwangkay: Funerary Music of the Dayak Benuaq of Borneo.

Interpretation of an image found on Musique Ethiopennes. Throughout the year I have explored several collections of traditional Ethiopian music.

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.


 

Theoretical Girls: Margaret de Wys

 

Margaret de Wys, Glenn Branca. Oil on canvas, 11x14 inches, 2021.

For a few years now I have the CD Theoretical Record by Theoretical Girls downloaded into my iTunes folder. I'm delighted every time a song from this collection pops up when I have the iTunes library set in shuffle mode. Keyboard Etude is a second keyboard spectacle high up in the list of the Top 100 2021 (Rated X by Miles Davis is the other one.) I did regard Theoretical Girls as Glenn Branca's band and didn't think there were any women in Theoretical Girls. (I knew that Barbara Ess, who died in March of this year, was with Branca in The Static.) Theoretical Girls was formed in 1976 by Branca and Jeffrey Lohn and also included Wharton Tiers and Margaret de Wys. De Wys played keyboards in the band so I must assume it is her featuring prominently on Keyboard Etude. Margaret de Wys is a composer and sound installation artist whose promising career was drastically altered when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999. She decided, at the time, to seek alternative healing methods and ended up in Ecuador in the care of a Shuar shaman named Carlos. While I was reading a long interview with de Wys in Bomb Magazine I was thinking: "Is this the same shaman I painted just a few weeks ago?" As it turns out the Shuar shaman is a different individual as the one who worked with de Wys, but it affirmed to me how interconnected and cohesive the songs and paintings of the Top 100 2021 are. Margaret de Wys has written several books on shamanism and healing since.

Re: Sound

Glenn Branca
oil on found painting, 5 x 6.5 inches, 2016

The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery that shows work by Philip Corner (see previous discussion) also features a series of beautiful large drawings and altered instruments by composer Glenn Branca. For the occasion I pulled the LP Ascension (a valuable collector's item) from the shelves. The cover of the album (1981) was created by Robert Longo and one of the (many) resonant droning guitars that can be heard on the record is played by Lee Ranaldo, who in the same year went on to form Sonic Youth.