Heartlandtruckstop

Beth Orton
11' x 7.25"
oil on wood, 2010

During my time off work I undertook several road trips. Driving long distance is great for music listening. The best music for driving is popular music, with the occasional sing-along hit. It so happened that not too long ago I purchased a whole stack of popular music from the discard bin at the library. The problem often, with popular CDs is that besides the hit song the rest of the CD is hardly worth listening to. In the old days of popular music the artists went into the studio to record but a few tracks, singles. A whole album, more than an hour, is often too much for a band, any band to be able to hold my attention. Usually I'm done with listening to a CD after about three songs (the best song is often the first track). The notable exception from the recent stack of CDs is Comfort of Strangers by Beth Orton. It is one of those albums that you can play over and over again and it only gets better. I have a history liking the songs of a certain female singer-songwriters; in the last decade there have been one or two albums each year that I played many, many times (something I don't usually do). The Beth Orton CD, purchased for only a dollar is bound to be one of this year's top albums as I listened to it more than any other album thus far. Heartlandtruckstop is the first song from the CD to be included in the Top 100 2010 and several others are close behind. I just got done with the first painting of her and I'm looking forward to painting two or three more. The following list represent ten albums from singer-songwriters that yielded multiple songs in a Top 100 of recent years. The list is in no particular order.

• Cat Power - You Are Free
• Alela Diane - To Be Still
• Lucinda Williams - Essence
• Jolie Holland - Springtime Can Kill You
• Joni Mitchell - Blue
• Jessica Lea Mayfield - Blasphemy, So Heartfelt
• Beth Orton - Comfort of Strangers
• Cat Power - The Greatest
• Jolie Holland - Escondida
• Marianne Faithfull - Before the Poison
  

Ca Trù performance

Musicians performing Ca Trù
16" x 12"
oil on wood, 2010

Yay, vacation! Finally time to watch the World Cup, but there ain't many games left: Holland is in the final, yay! After two games last weekend and a lot of sleeping I started right back into those paintings again, and music too. It took a while but the twentieth top 10 for the music year 2010 is written down. This particular top 10 reflects my inclination towards collecting field recordings from all over the world. The first place I look at in a record store is the used vinyl world music section. Last Sunday I ended up buying three used CDs and an LP from Jamaica/UK, Papua New Guinea, Peru, and India. Slowly this part of my collection is becoming interesting and bulky. I organize these geographically.

I promised to forward herein every tenth top 10, so here's the twentieth:

1. Mohanlal Rayani – Rãg Mãdh, Tãl Kharwa
   
2. Ca Trù performance (anon.), North Vietnam
3. Michael Hurley - Girl on the Billboard
   
4. Coralie Clément – Avec Ou Sans Moi
5. Massar Egbari featuring Donia Massoud – Wailing song
6. Melchior Bances y Pastoras – Pastoras de Mórrope
7. Gania and Famu – Funerary song weep
8. Pierre Henry – Psyché Rock
9. David Allen Coe - The Perfect Country and Western Song
10. Geechie Wiley – Last Kind Words Blues

The Melchior Bances tune comes from Traditional Music of Peru 4: Lambayeque. I wrote in one of the commentaries to last years Top 100 that I would buy every year one volume of the series, this is keeping my word (seven more years to go). The Geechie Wiley, #1 in the Top 100 1999, appeared in a dream. Gania and Famu come from a three CD set dedicated to the music of the Bosavi rain forest in Papua New Guinea, it belongs to my mini collection of weep singing. Coralie Clément I heard on NPR. My stepson Emil played David Allen Coe for me. The Michael Hurley is from a wonderful zine called PRISM index, compiled by a friend (Jeffrey Bowers, check it out: PRISMindex.com). Rayani is from the LP Hindustani: A Panorama of North indian Music. Yay, vacation is going to be great!

Sung Poetry of North Vietnam

Performer in Unesco documentary on Ca Trú
10" x 7.5"
pencil on paper, 2010

Top 100 updates: Spring and Summer remain slow. Soundtrack this past month are vuvuzelas, the most annoying instrument on earth. My least favorites instruments used to be Scottish pipes and Peruvian pan flutes but both I've grown to like and have been represented in past Top 100s. I don't think the vuvuzela will ever make it but the Dutch perform well in the World Cup so far and I continue to listen to this annoying instrument. I know people that really love the sounds (of traffic and such) of the big city, and according to the performer the Lord Buckley, the spinning wheel was Mahatma Gandhi's favorite instrument of all India.

I didn't paint for two weeks but today, a nice hot and quiet Sunday, I worked with this image of a Vietnamese performer of Ca Trú, a traditional form of sung poetry. The image comes from a video documentary on the subject published by Unesco. First I tried ink, then I used markers, and on this third one I only used a pencil. I intend to make a painting and the drawing above is a sketch for it. Usually I don't make a separate sketch for a painting but the image, I think, demands it this time. The traditional sung poetry of North Vietnam is a very strict art form. The performance is subject to many regulations. So many that the performances are completely devoid of emotion, sexuality, and spontaneity. The resulting sound (as well as the visual presence of the performers) is delicate, airy, eerie, frail, and contains a strange sense of beauty. The tradition is 900 years old, threatened with extinction, but protected by the cultural authorities, and well recorded. I felt that while drawing the female singer, who also plays a simple percussion instrument, I needed to take very good care of depicting the subtleties of expression and pose. Like the music in which beauty is derived from strict regulations the painting to be also should be executed with the utmost technical preparations. "When singing her mouth should not be opened so widely" is one of the restrictions imposed on the singer. I'm going to paint an image of Ca Trú and I won't open my mouth.

One of the most interesting anecdotes from the world of ethnomusicology I've come across, comes from the great Alan Lomax, who observed that more restricted social mores and behaviors of a society result in a more nasal style of singing. I'm going to paint this image of Ca Trú in falsetto, in a minor key. Where is the pain in painting?

(no title)

Darkthrone
23.5" x 12"
oil on wood, 2010

A slow season in Top 100 world, it's summer, there's a world cup going on, there's my job at the gallery. Unexpectedly a new exhibition was scheduled when it should have been the slow season. Too busy, can't even watch the world cup games because they are played at times when I have to work. I've seen just a few minutes here and there, 15 minutes Brazil, 10 minutes Japan, I didn't see Portugal at all. I got up early this morning to see if the New Zealand team would perform the haka (see April post: Sports and Music) but they didn't. Doom and gloom all over. Haven't been in my studio much, hardly made any Top 10s, hardly found any new music to listen to. To catch up on making a painting for music that already secured a Top 100 2010 spot, I painted this Darkthrone. Last year I used the same image (from a photo by Peter Beste) but painted the two Darkthrone members, Fenriz and Nocturno Culto separate. My composition compared to Peter Beste's is cropped and that's my favorite part of it. I don't know why I did it (I never crop my figures) but I like it. I tell my students that if you work on a painting or drawing and a crazy impulsive idea comes to your mind, to never reject that idea but to explore it. That idea is your unconscious telling you how to make the work worthwhile. I also tell my students that they shouldn't think too much about what they are doing. Thinking about a crazy impulsive idea for sure ends into a rejection of it. I proudly tell them that this is probably the only class they will encounter in college in which the teacher discourages thinking. Descartes turned inside out, "I wish I was a mole in the ground, so I could root that mountain down".

Bob Marley

Bob Marley
12" x 10"
oil on wood, 2010

I'm a fan of football, I go crazy for it. I played as a kid, I played as an adult, I watch it whenever I can. In five days the world cup starts and I'm getting really nervous. It could be the year that the team I'm rooting for –our national team, the Dutch that is– will become the next world champions. Yesterday the team (and me too for that matter) suffered a major setback in its bid though, as their star player Arjen Robben suffered an injury and most likely will miss out on the entire competition. I wanted to paint a football picture. In the late eighties I painted a lot of football pictures, my first solo exhibition was filled with depictions of my football heroes. But then I started to paint my music heroes. Both topics are driven by fan obsession but there is a big difference: The music paintings are a celebration of the human mind whereas the football paintings celebrated the body. The Wexner Center for the Arts, the #1 venue for contemporary art in this city, just organized the exhibition Hard Bodies, all about that celebration, all about masculinity. I'm not interested in a celebration of masculinity, I can appreciate a good play but I don't care for the aesthetics of it and even less for the player's good looks. I teach figure drawing to art students which is also purely about the body but not so much about masculinity. Most models are very feminine (and very beautiful) as a matter of fact.

The only picture of a musical hero playing football I know of is of Bob Marley. Bob Marley was a football fanatic and friend of Jamaica's biggest football star of the 70s Allen Cole (who was kicked off his last team for wearing dreadlocks). Convenience will have it that after seven years of absence Bob Marley is back in the Top 100 list. My wife Maria pulled this old tape I recorded for her twelve years ago, out of the drawer and played it many times. My (and her as well) favorite Bob Marley song these days is also the most spiritual from the African Herbsmen album on that tape: Put it On. "I rule my destiny. Oh Lord I thank you."

Blooddawn

Donn of Blooddawn
11" x 8.5"
ink and acrylic on paper, 2010

In black metal circles Blooddawn is best known as a song by the Swedish band Marduk. The word comes from a role playing game situated in Earth’s Second Dark Age. The players are prophets send to the blasted ruins of Earth. No wonder the term is popular among black metal bands. The bands Redrum and Lut’ also have songs with that title (they may be covers of the Marduk song, I don’t know), and there are several bands named Blooddawn: A trash metal band from Germany, black metal bands from Brazil and the UK, and there is a death metal band called Blood By Dawn. The British band is from Newcastle upon Tyne in the Northeast. Donn and P are their members, and their song Nailed Fist is found on the cd accompanying the only metal magazine I have: Zero Tolerance (#33), the same magazine I found Vampyre Corpse in. I don’t know what it is about black metal images that makes me pull out my sketchbook and draw with black ink (rather than my usual oil on wood.) Maybe I do know what it is about black metal but am too embarrassed to tell.

Roberto Carlos Lange

Roberto Carlos Lange
20" x 17.75"
oil on wood, 2010

In keeping up painting for the Top 100, I worked all last week on the Roberto Carlos Lange painting whose track Amazonian Pacific currently resides at #3. The image is a still from a video my wife made during the sound-check for a performance at Country Club in Cincinnati. We met Roberto there and talked for a while. A lovely time indeed. I wanted to buy one of his records for sale there and asked him which one to get. "What are you looking for", he asked. I said "I liked the rawness of a Helado Negro (one of his bands) tune I saw on a video". He recommended the Intonations LP that contains this Amazonian Pacific. I like it a lot but not because of any rawness on it. His music is not about rawness but I never asked him what it would be about instead. A question like that I find a little rude. People hardly ever ask me that question but my paintings are obvious true representations of musicians. When they do ask I have sort of a standard answer that always involves the words fan, archive, and obsession. I then explain that the concept works because I didn't think it up: It started as a boy's hobby and it evolved organically over 28 years without ever changing the main concept. I'm sure Roberto also would have a standard paragraph to answer the question. His music is pretty abstract and thus harder to pin down. What do I think his music is about? Well, first of all about atmosphere in a formal sense. Then I think it is about spiritual concepts concerning community, humanity (love and such) in a broader sense and, in an even broader sense; cosmology. That's all good and well but what really matters, on a night like that Saturday in Cincinnati, is how the keyboard stand is set up on stage. If you look at the painting the keyboard is a bit high: he would not have been able to comfortably perform his music this way. I just noticed it, and once you see it you see nothing but. So I have to fix it in the painting. A weeks worth of painting (not precisely 40 hours; I have a job so it's 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there). Two hours on Sunday, a half hour Tuesday, another half hour Wednesday, a full hour on Saturday. And now, the next Sunday, it's done but then I notice that big mistake. Thank God it's a three day weekend.

Vampyre Corpse

Naughtus Maximus (Vampyre Corpse)
11" x 8.5"
Pen, pencil, ink on paper, 2010

You may have noticed in the second to last blog the name Vampyre Corpse at #1 in the Top 100 so far. You probably haven't heard of Vampyre Corpse, and if you don't follow this blog, or are a subscriber to a magazine called Zero Tolerance, you most likely never will. I am proud to say that when you google the band, right after their own MySpace site this very blog comes up as second. They are from England, two of the band members you may have heard of: Kane and Abel, they may be twins (both still alive), they may not be. The one I made a drawing of, depicted here, is neither Kane nor Abel but their bass player Naughtus Maximus, the fourth band member calls himself (or herself –not likely, but you never know) Memnoch. The style, according to the band on their MySpace site, is Black Metal, Death Metal, and/or Big Beat. Their sound pushes the extreme of metal yet further, it's wild and raw, out of bounds, violent, inhuman almost (subhuman?). The song Dogs of War lasts about two minutes but it is two minutes that makes a lot of music that came before now obsolete. They surpassed all songs that contained feline sounds in their vocals, as well as songs dealing with werewolves, and the general heavyness of sound is unsurpassed too. The drawing I did may seem as uncontrolled, wild and heavy as the music but I swear it was well planned out. I did several before this one, and I also swear I was sober when I drew it. I swear I was sober!

Ome Tini

Tien Burgers
7.75" x 6.75"
oil on wood, 2010

A little break from music now as I painted a portrait of man who has nothing to do with the Top 100 of 2010 but if I were to make a top 100 of my all time favorite people this person would sure score high. Tien Burgers is his name, or ome Tini, as I would call him. Last month my uncle Tini passed away after a short but intense battle with cancer. He was my favorite uncle, my godfather, and next door neighbor for a good part of my life. I will always remember him dearly. Rest peaceful dear uncle. My condolences to his family to whom I will send this painting. I wish them all the strength to carry on.

Beira-Baixa (Portugal)

Woman from Beira-Baixa with Donkey (large detail)
32" x 20"
oil on wood, 2010

This is a larger version of an image I've painted before in 2005. I took six photos of the painting upon finishing and the one shown here I took without a flash, not enough daylight, a hand not sturdy enough. I like the fuzzy 'motion' quality of the bad photo, I may go back into the painting and apply some motion filters manually with the brush while the paint is still wet. I may not. First photography and now Photoshop have revolutionized painting! In a few weeks I will post a sharp version of this painting along with images of paintings that I already posted before but retouched. I tend to do this all the way up to the time I exhibit the Top 100. I went back into the Joseph Spence painting because I felt proportions could be more natural and now it's a better painting than the one below from the previous post. The Cat Power painting I retouched just to add some refinement. I liked that painting from the very beginning.

The song I illustrated with a woman and a donkey is Cançao de Embalar (meaning Rendez-Vous) from a nice cd in a Music and Musicians series. This cd is dedicated to the folk music of Portugal. Several women, all anonymous, perform on this track. The third track on the cd (also from Beira-Baixa) is a song about camomile called Macelada. I was so happy learn this because in last year's writings I dedicated a whole paragraph on the topic of herbal songs for the occasion of a song in that Top 100 about basil from Serbia. Alas, here's that paragraph.

Unlike songs about art, there is no anxiety in songs about herbs. (Quite a category indeed and well worth listing, especially since I like to make lists: She Likes Weeds was a hit for the Tee Set; Scarborough Fair –parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme– for Simon and Garfunkel; African Herbsman by Bob Marley; Neil Young's Cinnamon Girl; and I'm not even getting started on songs about marijuana.) Oj ubuva malo momo deals with basil, Serbian people (used to) carry bits of basil with them to church and also used it in their homes for fragrance.

Let me know if you know of any other songs on the topic.
In the meantime: The 16th Top 10 provided me with more songs to be included in The Top 100 2010. There are now ten song certain of a spot in the list.

1. Vampyre Corpse - Dogs of War
2. Roberto Carlos Lange - Amazonian Pacific
3. Sekouba Traore – Walinyumadon
4. Blooddawn - Nailed Fist
5. Time and Temperature – Havana
   
6. Clarinetes de Linares – El Gallito Giro
   
7. Smodern (?) – Miss Smodern
   
8. Mother of Fire – The Beast and I
   
9. Bob Marley – Put it on
10. Tsjuder – Blasphemy

Joseph Spence

Joseph Spence
45" x 20"
oil on wood, 2010

Haven't bought too many records lately. There's a little bit of a lull in my usual music exploration ways. Of the few I bought in recent weeks, an LP on the Mississippi label called Fight On, Your Time Ain't Long is the best one is. It's the third one I own from that label and all are wonderful. Fight On, Your Time Ain't Long is a collection of obscure blues and gospel, no recording dates, no information on the performers. The Joseph Spence song on the album Won't That Be a Happy Time is not as obscure since I already owned a copy of it. It appeared on the record The Real Bahamas In Music and Song recorded in 1965 by Peter Siegel. The ten points I awarded for the song in my 14th Top 10 of the year brought the total of points for Joseph Spence to 117, enough to enter an ongoing list of the 200 musicians with the most points gathered in the 28 years of list making. The Top 10 of that list is as follows:

1. Bob Dylan
2. Jimi Hendrix
3. The Velvet Underground
4. Captain Beefheart
5. Cat Power
6. Daniel Johnston
7. Frank Zappa
8. Neil Young
9. John Coltrane
10. Miles Davis
    

I did guarantee that the next painting would be big again. This Joseph Spence painting is bigger yet than the last one of Cat Power but even though the size allows me to really 'paint', it bugs me conceptually. It feels too big for what the image is: a commercial photograph of the Bahamian singer/guitarist. I felt like I've just painted a tourist painting that I could sell on the tourist markets in Nassau. (Now I come to think of it, maybe it's not such a bad idea. Who needs a studio when there's palm trees and 85 degrees year round.) Cat Power's image is different in that it is a painter's image. The next one on a larger scale I think should be of anonymous people suitable for a big scale painting. I'm thinking of a Portuguese woman in traditional dress from Beira-Baixa illustrating anonymous traditional music from that area in Portugal that I just awarded ten points in my 15th Top 10.

Cat Power in 2010

Cat Power
36" x 13.5"
oil on wood, 2010

A brand new painting, executed rather quickly, again of an artist not (yet) in the Top 100 for the year. More than six times larger than my average Top 100 painting. Something had to happen, I had to break through this habitual manner of painting I've been doing, it was getting on my nerves. I ask myself what would be a better way to open things up than to make it bigger? I made it bigger and I liked it. Would it mean that I have to paint all hundred that big now? That would be quite a challenge. I need the challenge, be tough on myself, but this seems crazy. I had this three feet plywood board in front of me ready to cut it up into my usual ten inch sizes but then a feeling of defiance came over me: I couldn't cut it up. The next dilemma was to decide who to paint - it could not just be anyone that I would paint bigger than anybody else - I decided it had to be Cat Power - I've painted her more than any other musician - must have painted her thirty times. I'm not sure if I'm up to the challenge to paint all hundred that big, but the next one will be big again, I guarantee.
I'm awaiting Cat Power's new release. All original songs so 'they' promise. It's gonna be good but scary she promises. I've been waiting a long time already but while I wait Sophisticated Lady, an old Duke Ellington song, secured Cat Power's first points in the music year 2010.