A Pint of Blood

Jolie Holland
15" x 10"
oil on wood, 2011

All Those Girls is the first song on Jolie Holland’s new cd A Pint of Blood. Unlike some other top 100 muses (both Beth Orton’s an Cat Power’s new cd’s have been promised but not delivered) I didn’t have to wait many years before a new cd of hers came out. The painting of Jolie Holland in concert I did for–and at the dead of–last year’s top 100 but never put it up the blog. Because I still wanted to publish the image and I’m really fond of it, I decided I use it for All Those Girls at the dead of this year’s. You can read more about my interactions with Ms. Holland by clicking on her name in the right sidebar☛

Painting a Jolie Holland Portrait

Pheoris West was one of painting teachers in college. Last week I attended a painting demonstration by him. He painted a portrait of a model and while he was doing that he told stories about his life, about his college years and about painting. His portrait turned out really great. I learned a lot from him that day in just an hour and a half. I never learned much painting technique in college you know, I wish I had a bit more of that. I'm still learning, and occasionally (like this portrait of Jolie Holland) I make a painting just as a technical exercise. I never showed any of these musician's portraits to any of my Professors, I deemed these a mere hobby. My art was making large modernist paintings. The demonstration gave me an understanding of underpainting. My wife Maria always loves my underpaintings but really I knew as much about underpants as about underpaintings. In his view the underpainting is all about light, you become one with the source. (In the case of the Jolie Holland portrait that would be the sun.) He often paints his 'light' layer with extreme detail on a mid-value primed surface and then paints subsequent transparent color layers. (Jolie Holland is painted on blue.) Pheoris told the audience he learned to paint by copying. Painting, as athletics, for him was a competitive business. If he was blown away by some painting he saw, he would work to be just as good, or better. I attest to that attitude and to honor his teachings I decided to make a Pheoris West. It felt good doing it. It felt good being him and it felt good being the sun (especially considering the bitter cold circumstances the Jolie Holland portrait was painted in).

Jolie Holland
13.25" x 7.75"
oil on wood 2011

The Jolie Holland photograph I painted from was taken by Maria. In the original photograph I am standing right next to her but I cropped myself out of it for the painting. It's not about me, you see, it's about them.

Kyp Malone and Jolie Holland at the Summit

Jolie Holland
(signed by Jolie Holland)
10" x 8"
pen on paper, 2009

Thus I went to this much anticipated concert by Jolie Holland. It was good, really good, mind you, but talking to Ms. Holland was a bit disappointing. Not that she wasn't nice, she was nice enough but I had hoped she would have remembered me from a year and a half ago when I made sketches of her performing in Nelsonville. She signed one of these sketches with “♥ Jolie” and witnessed me drawing a portrait of T -Model Ford. I was hoping then to talk with the Top 100 muse of recent years a little bit more casual and less like fan versus idol.  I have been intending to grow up some during this process and interact more with the performers and make a few paintings from life. I'm old enough, older than many of the musicians I paint but this is apparently not the year. Let's see what next year brings, it'll start in just a few weeks. Still none of Jolie's songs in the list this year but a last minute entry is likely to happen because I did buy her newest LP The Living and the Dead, it is good... She signed the album too. The opener to Jolie Holland's show was played by Kyp Malone. I hadn't given it much thought but I knew he was in a band called TV on the Radio that I really like. I didn't realize it until I saw Kyp Malone on stage that he was part of a series of drawings I did a few year ago comprising the quiz Guess the Identity of These Men with Beards. Had I realized beforehand I would've taken a copy with me and given it to Mr. Malone, he would've gotten a kick out of it. Maybe I still can find a way to forward him a copy. Scroll back in the blog archive and find the quiz under the heading Games, Games, Games. The performance by Kyp Malone was awesome, by the way.