Positive Body Image

Janis Ian/Nina Simone

Janis Ian and Nina Simone were friends at some point. Then they fell out. Who knows what happened exactly but Simone was known to have a bad temper and was later diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. While in the process of finishing the above painting, I re-listened to Simone's cover of Ian's song Stars, and Maria, my spouse, commented "she must be on drugs." I never considered that and thought of the song, that Simone paired with the famous hit Feelings at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1976, as a brilliant and intense performance. Maria was right though, towards the end of the 17 minute rendition, Simone herself alludes to drug use. A review on the Guardian confirms that Simone was sometimes incomprehensible and unsteady during the performance. Ian's original, from 1974, is a manifesto of what is called today "positive body image," as was her most famous hit At 17. The message spread by Ian and Simone had been analogous at times, and Simone acknowledges Ian in the performance by mentioning her name in the same breath with Janis Joplin and Billie Holiday.
 

Four Women (and four men as well)

Lisle Atkinson/Nina Simone

Lisle Atkinson was the bass player for Nina Simone during the 1960s. Nina Simone wrote Four Women in 1965 and it first appeared on her Wild is the Wind album from 1966. Some people criticized Simone for using African-American stereotypes but those criticisms clearly missed the point. Simone continued to use the song in her live performances and many versions can be found on-line. I watched quite a few of those. The version in the Top 100 is a live version recorded in France in 1969. Lisle Atkinson had stayed behind. The rather seductive image of Simone comes from a photo by Michael Ochs and was published in Rolling Stone Magazine. I usually stay away from using professional sources but could not resist the temptation to use this beautiful shot by Ochs (Getty Images).

Bearded man from the Oenpelli Mission/Douglass Baglin

While the Australian side (side A) from the LP The Columbia Library of Primitive and Folk Music, Vol. 5: Australia & New Guinea is listed as recorded by E.P. Enkin, tracks 12-15, are actually used courtesy of the Australian Broadcast commission at the Oenpelli Mission east of Darwin (now Gunbalanya). Both the Mourning Call and the Wongga this painting illustrates belong to the Australian Broadcast Corp. and were not recorded by E.P. Enkin. Enkin did write the liner notes for it though and tells us that the Wongga is a "campfire trading and sweetheart song by men of the Djauan tribe." He then informs us that we hear an accompaniment of a didjeridu and clapping sticks. Enkin recorded the other materials in 1949 but no date has been assigned to ABC recordings. The image I chose to paint is from a much reproduced photo by the Australian photographer Douglass Baglin, who published a series of photo books documenting the people of Australia. For the volume on indigenous people Bagnin didn't bother to identify the individuals by name as he had done in other volumes. The individual in this image was simply identified as "Bearded man from the Oenpelli Mission." The photo was taken in 1968. The image of a whistling Douglass Baglin comes from a photo taken by Colin Preese also in 1968.

Jo Johnson/Niki Elliott (Huggy Bear)

The band Huggy Bear formed in Brighton, England in 1991. They're assiociated with the Riot Grrrl movement but there's also two guys in the five-piece band, so they see themselves rather as "girl-boy revolutionaries." When I first painted them some twenty years ago they were only known by their first names and photographs were sparse. They never interviewed and never signed for a major label but produced a string of records between 1991 and 1994. The tune in the Top 100 is a 45 called Her Jazz. That 45 is split with Bikini Kill whom they toured with in 1993. It was because of Bikini Kill I bought the 45 EP and introduced me to the band.

Sherine Fatima Balti/David Lewiston

Desperate for an image of either Sonam Chungjung or Sonam Lamo, two itinerant singers from Ladakh, India, I came across an image of the singer Sherine Fatima Balti. Nicknamed the Balti Nightingale, she lives in Turtuk, the second northernmost village in India in a disputed region with Pakistan. Fatima Balti considers herself a Balti from Pakistani region of Baltistan, directly across the border from Ladakh. Neither Sonam was among the the images that come with Davis Lewiston's Ladakh: Songs & Dances from the Highlands of Western Tibet. [Nonesuch, 1977] Pala nyima zangmo is an "old song of social comment."

Black is a color

2020 was a horrible year. A political nightmare here in the States, a pandemic of epic proportions, and the killing of several African-Americans by police forces in several cities in the US. The killing of George Floyd in May of 2020, the next one in a series of high-profile instances of police brutality, took things to a boiling point. The country, and the world at that time, were on hold, in quarantine at the higth of the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic, but the racially motivated killings could not keep hundreds of thousands of people to take to the streets. I was not one of them, I'm not one to take to the streets, but I very much felt the pain and I have been a vocal sympathizer to the cause, to the Black Lives Matter movement. Naturally the music selected to listen to in those days reflected these sentiments and I found myself listening to the soundtrack of various Civil Rights movements. Somewhere around that time a documentary was aired (I think it might have been on VH1) about the Black Panther movement of the 60s and 70s. I was highly impressed by the soundtrack of that documentary and by the artwork of Emery Douglas, who provided the graphics for Black Panther publications. One of the anthems for the civil rights/black liberation movements of the 1970s was The Revolution Will Not Be Televised by the soul and jazz poet Gil-Scott Heron. The inclusion in the documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution made the song re-apear in my Top 100.

Another one that entered the Top 100 2020 in the same week in the early Summer of 2020 was Black Is... by the Last Poets. I've been a long time fan of the Last Poets and by chance I happened to meet Umar Bin Hassan (who wrote and recorded Black Is...). This was in 2005 after a concert by the legendary Reggae group Culture, at Alrosa Village in Columbus, Ohio. The person in charge of the programming, a huge Reggae fan who had been visiting my Top 100 shows around that time, had invited me back stage. This is when I ended up smoking some joints with Umar Bin Hassan. Good times! The focus on civil rights themed music then also brought Nina Simone back on my radar (not that she was ever far off) and I listened to a good many records I own of hers. She's twice in the Top 100 2020. My all time favorite of hers is Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair and after a high ranking in 2020 it reappeared in the 2021 version. The provisional #36 spot in the Top 100 2021 of that song neatly coincided (in terms of painting the entries according to their positions on the lists) with numbers 98 and 99 of the Top 100 2020: The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron.

Nina Simone/Emile Latimer

 

Two New Ink Drawings

Topoke line dance, 11 x 14, ink on paper, 2020

I've completed two new ink drawings this week. Both represent seconds, musicians or peoples I already painted for this year's top 100. The two drawings represent numbers 39 & 40 in the Top 100 2020. For more information on the Topoke people I encourage you to watch the video chronicling the previous Topoke drawing from earlier this year. The link to it can be found here. The second Topoke track in the list is a mourning song sung by women, the second Nina Simone track in the list is Sinnerman and comes from the album Pastel Blues.

 Nina Simone, 14 x 11, ink on paper, 2020

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.

Self-portrait-a-day

Self Portrait as Cat Power: Moon Pix
Blue ballpoint on paper, 12x9 inches, 2017

As one of many New Year's resolutions I decided I would do a self portrait a day. Towards the end of last year I had already started doing the morning pages, stream of consciousness writing geared toward freeing creativity. I found at a thrift store the book The Artist Way by Julia Cameron, a best selling new age self help guide book for blocked artists. Due to an intense teaching schedule I had only made few works in the autumn of 2016. I had nothing to loose. It was a good thing, I'm still doing these three pages each morning in a note book that I had dedicated as a dream journal a few months earlier. The self portraits seem a logic extension to the morning pages. What better way to get back into producing work again than to draw self portraits? Next week I start teaching a drawing class in college and I intend to make the students do a self-portrait-a-day, preferably in the morning. As a teacher to this class I decided I would be a student at the same time, expose myself to the same rigorous regime as I put the students through. I get a fresh start myself in a way. Start over. New year, new beginning. The portraits very quickly turned into a Top 100 extension (as so much of my work does): draw myself as the musicians from the Top 100 appear on their records. I've done it before, some 12 years ago—I was still a handsome fella then—but now as an old man. 

Ghana/Self
oil on paper, 24x18" 2004 

Anyway... the first one, as it was the first one in 2004, in this context is a Cat Power impersonation. The image I started with is the cover of the Moon Pix album. I've used it several times before for Cat Power portraits, it's lovely image. The artist who created the image is  Roe Etheridge. The image is reproduced in a book that features some of my own works as well. You Should've Heard Just What I Seen was published in 2013. Yesterday I wrote a new artist statement for a job application. It's basically an update from the statement at the header of this page. Here it is in full:

"The Top 100 is an ongoing series of one hundred portrait paintings of musicians and accompanying writings every year since 1989. The simple and straight forward concept of the Top 100 has stayed the same throughout almost 30 years of painting. The premise is the shallow vantage point of a music fan at his insignificant home looking out onto a world of cultural importance. While the context has shifted from a hobby to an activity within contemporary art, the essence has stayed the same. The format is a hermetic system in which everything is open and free to experiment, surprise, failure and excellence, open too to different styles and techniques, emotional expression and introversion. The format is both that of a personal diary and of an impersonal archive charting the music an individual encounters throughout a lifetime. The Top 100 is a testament of a life lived in the margins of notoriety and a historical record of the world of music and the scene of the avant garde. Shameless crushes and adorations of musical heroes provide an intimate yet recognizable account of oneʼs humble existence within an unattainable world bigger than ours. That the paintings of musicians are now shown at the same venues as their objects of desire play in, and the painted portraits appear on the sleeves of the sound recordings they illustrate, does not alter the relationship between object and subject. The artist responsible is still that fan. Itʼs all about them, the others."

I might as well forward some other self portraits I did in the past few days. Nothing to be too proud of, perhaps even a bit embarrassing, but here they are regardless. A note about the Amalia Mendoza one is that I think she's one of the great singers of the 20th century but unfortunately the context of her recordings make it less universally so: Mariachi. There's nothing wrong with mariachi but the Mendoza records (I have four of them) could certainly do without. If I had the time, expertise, and equipment, I would reissue all her records without the mariachi. She would sing unaccompanied or, in some cases, just by an acoustic guitar or piano. Her voice does not need all these happy trumpets. The best self portrait perhaps, thus far, is the one where I substitute Nina Simone's face for my own. The image is from her first record Little Girl Blue.

Self Portrait as Amalia Mendoza: Los Exitos
Blue ballpoint on paper, 12x9 inches, 2017

Self Portrait as Nina Simone: Little Girl Blue
Blue ballpoint on paper, 12x9 inches, 2017

Another Stencil

Nina Simone
12 x 9 inches, stencil print, 2016

The stencil assignment continues to be a part of Art Appreciation at FSW. As I am teaching yet another section this Summer, 26 students created a stencil print in an edition of ten. They trade, one with me, nine with fellow students, and they keep an artist proof in their sketchbook. For the occasion I create a stencil in an edition of the class size +10. The subject of my print should be relevant to the young students as well as my Top 100. This semester I chose Nina Simone (1933-2003). While none of the students had ever heard of Nina Simone, the biographical movie Nina, that was just released, as well as her relevance in the civil rights movement, much discussed these days in the light of the Black Lives Matter movement, I found a teachable opportunity in choosing her. Recently I purchased my 10th and 11th Nina Simone records, about a third of her discography, mostly from thrift stores. As far as I can tell there are no bad Nina Simone records out there. If anyone is interested in owning a copy of the print (edition 37), I sell off the remaining 10 prints for $50 each, just respond to this post and we'll make arrangements.

Nina Simone!

Nina Simone
oil on canvas, 20 x 16 inches, 2016

To Be Young, Gifted and Black is a song written by Nina Simone with Weldon Irvine in memory of the author, and friend of Simone, Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun). It was just released as a single in October of 1969 when Simone performed it live at the Philharmonic Hall in New York. The concert in front of a white audience (which Simone does not fail to mention in her introduction to To Be Young, Gifted and Black) was recorded and released on the album Black Gold of 1970. I found the album together with 'Nuff Said of 1968, at the local Goodwill Outlet Center—the last place items exist before being crunched in a giant garbage machine. The album existed on a shelf, or in a box, in someone's house for 46 years, hardly ever played, before being rescued from its destruction. And now it has a new life, and a painting dedicated to it. "Her picture is painted in my memory without a color of despair, and no matter where I go she is always there." (added lyrics to Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair.)

For those of you who ever visited the Koreshan State Park in Estero might recognize the background as being the generator building interior.

The 100 Greatest Recordings Ever: #70, Nina Simone

Nina Simone (2)

Nina Simone
14" x 8"
oil on wood, 2010

It's finished, the second Simone painting of the year. It's a strange one. I sort of like the top part, the bottom part too, but together... It's just strange. Thus comes the second writing of the year about Nina Simone... But I'm at a loss, confused, confused by the painting, confused by my previous post (on Simone's diary), confused by her nakedness (I'd so vowed not to paint nudes anymore!) For inspiration on what to write I looked at comments made by viewers on YouTube. I viewed some videos of my favorite Simone songs and read hundreds of comments. Most of these comments, as one could expect, are not worth being published... I take that back: everything is worthy, as a matter of fact I'd wish some people would comment on mine. anything, even a :) or a :(, better yet an xoxo, or an lol. The painting... Clearly more about me than about Nina Simone. The writing too then, should be an exercise in auto-psycho-analysis 101, doing the patient part as well as the therapist's... But confusion prevails; the comments—no matter how sincerely—from my fellow-Nina-Simone-YouTube-watchers didn't help, and my own typed words lead to no particular conclusion...

Nina Simone

Nina Simone
20" x 6"
oil behind plexiglass, 2010

Nina Simone has been in and out of my top 100 lists since the beginning in 1983. I own ten LPs, two CDs, and eight singles with her recordings, and this year year a whole score of her songs have been listed in various top 10 lists. Through gossip columns of music magazines I've been aware of her troubled mind, the difficult circumstances of her life, and her eccentric character, but what I knew of her was anecdotal at best. An article by Joe Hagan in The 2010 Music Issue of the Believer I've read recently, is different from the scandalous fodder usually associated with Simone, as it is a humanistic character sketch based on a newly discovered 'secret' diary of hers. The ten-page article deals with Simone's private and public life, and her sexual and racial identity. Simone herself is quoted at length through her lyrics and texts, passages from her diary are reproduced and used as illustrations, and a newly published song is tucked on a CD inside the magazine. It's a cover of an Alice Cooper song called I Never Cry, and illustrates an epitaph at the closing of the article, that was also on the last page of Simone's diary: "I learned that my pain, no matter how great, is a private matter (my hell is my own) and I must not tell it to any one else—there are no people who can help me."