Egypt

Nagat
12" x 9"
oil on canvas board, 2013

Nagat El Sagheera (pictured above) is an Egyptian singer I found through my friends at Bodega Pop, the one source to instruct me on the music from the Arabic world, old and new. Nagat is in between, neither old nor new, but a singer unlike I’ve ever heard in older or newer music. In stead of dwelling on this terrific recording of Ana Bashak El Bahr from the album Eyoun el Calb, I’ll talk about some of the techniques I used in painting these portraits. I direct you to Bodega Pop for more on Nagat (and you can listen to her music in the process).

After a series of double portraits I’m back to painting a single performer. Whenever a sort of series within the series happens (and this usually happens accidentally), there’s this urge to continue the trend. In 2006 I made the same attempt to paint all double portraits but then too, I gave up after the idea just didn’t make any sense anymore within the concept of the one hundred paintings. There’s a lot to be said for double portraits, both formally and conceptually, a whole range of ideas waiting to be explored, but I opt now to depart this exploration and leave it for the long term. Another thing the last series of paintings have in common is that the musicians are superimposed on landscape paintings that were made as demos for landscape painting classes I teach. And this, my friends, should continue, as at least three more of such 5 week classes are scheduled over the next few months. In contrast to last year’s, when the paintings were all done plein-air in my backyard. The new paintings are random Florida landscapes, and not as precious as the backyard ones. They are less planned out compared to last year’s. I randomly use these backgrounds as if they were blank canvases. You probably noticed that the landscape in the painting above was turned sideways. This also is the result of the randomness I treat the backgrounds with. For Nagat’s I simply chose to flip the landscape format of the demo into a portrait format. The choice is of course a formal one, but what does it mean conceptually? What does it do, for example, to my mantra “as it is above, so it is below?” Two halves of the composition exist side by side, rather than on top of one another. Except maybe in non-representational painting, or in diptychs, you don’t see this orientation much in two dimensional art. Sure the old Egyptians would paint trees sideways but they didn’t use the concept of the horizon. A concept abandoned again in the shift to non-representational painting that happened in the 20th century. In a parallel universe there’s no orientation. (Let’s leave it at that.)

And, by the way,….HAPPY NEW YEAR!

A Rundi Wake

Rundi women performing "Ubuhuha"
12" x 16". oil on wood, 2013

So my friend from the Netherlands came to visit for the holidays. He brought with him, as a gift, from his own collection, a fantastic set of records. My favorite so far from the set is a volume of traditional music from Burundi recorded in 1967. I've played the whole record several times already and it contains, perhaps the biggest bonus of all, an example of a lamentation that were traditionally performed during a wake. Once upon a time the lamenting of the dead was an almost universal practice but has since disappeared. About a year ago I compiled all examples I collected of recordings of such practices on a CD that I called Keening Songs and Death Wails. I am thrilled that I can add yet another one. Ubuhuha as these lamentations are called in Burundi is maybe my favorite of them all. (From the liner notes by Michel Vuylsteke:) "The women use their lips like reeds to set in motion the volume of air contained in the cavity formed by cupping both hands against their mouths. The resultant sounds vary in pitch, timbre and volume according to the postion of their hands and the  tension of their lips."

DEVO!

Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo
11' x 14", oil on canvas board, 2013

In 1984 the song Wiggly World by Devo made an appearance in the top 100 for that year. It came from the only LP that I owned of them back then, it was their second, the 1979 release Duty Now for the Future. Even though I acquired two more records in the following 29 years, Devo did not return to the list until this year when I met and befriended Jade Dellinger, (co)author of the book We Are DEVO! I read it and became hooked (again) to their story, their videos, and the music. The book is a "culturally essential" read, and I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in that era of (rock) history (the punk and new wave era that is). What I would recommend too is to watch (on YouTube) their video for Jocko Homo, a sort of Devo anthem. The video from 1976 is part of the short film (an art film) The Truth About De-Evolution. Jocko Homo was rerecorded in 1978 to feature on Devo's first album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!

I'm particularly interested in the concept of de-evolution (hence the name Devo), in which human kind, in stead of evolving is regressing backwards. It fits right in with the topic of paleolithic cave paintings that has kept my brain occupied for a while now. I have this vague notion that a concept (be it art, be it evolution) is at its strongest at the moment it appears. It is then when the circumstances are ideal for something to exist. Or as Devo would have it "the beginning is the end".

Women from Papeete

Women from Papeete 
(cd jacket of The Gaugain Years)
10" x 8".oil on canvas board, 2013

In front of me here I got this record with the title The Gaugain Years: Songs and Dances of Tahiti. The title is misleading because the songs on the record were not at all recorded during the Gaugain years but a good 75 years later. The text on the back sleeve puts Gaugain in the same category (tourists) as Captain Cook, missionaries, and European diseases. The text, however, is a fun piece of writing, full of irony, and from a very respectable source; that of the Nonesuch Explorer Series. It was written by Jane Sarnoff. She downplays the notion Westerners had of Tahiti as a synonym for paradise and argues that you would get a clearer picture of (pre-Western) Tahiti if you substitute “love,” and “easy living,” for “war,” and “oppression.” The song illustrated here is listed on the sleeve as Song for Birds in Flight and this is Sarnoff’s interpretation: “We may be romantically affected when we hear a singer in ecstasies about the flight of a bird (as if ‘we’ would be able to understand the words—ed.)—more likely the composer was trying to placate a bird after killing another one.” “No, the music of Tahiti isn’t just love—it’s hate, and fear, pride, and teaching, a way of life and a way to keep death at a distance.” The image in the painting comes from the jacket of the CD reissue of the LP (which hasn’t any photos). The photo (by Dennis Stock) includes a 1960s sports car. Gaugain would have rolled his eyes at that.

All the while, while painting these women from Papeete, I was thinking about the cave paintings of Lascaux. There is a hypothesis forming in my head. “What does that have to do with this painting?” you may ask yourself. And honestly: “I don’t know!”, but my intuition tells me that in some way it does.

A Greek myth

Breno Mello and Marpessa Dawn 
as Orpheus and Eurydice
11" x 14", oil on canvas board, 2013

My wife accuses me of gravitating towards the sad and subversive when it comes to works of music and visual art. Her choices are more those of a loving, romantic, and happy kind of human expression. While I obviously have to agree with her assessment, I can not explain it. I like to think that my choices are ART while hers are not, but deep in my heart I know this is not true. The questions that a comparison between our preferences raise are not easily answered, in fact it raises many more. Questions about the nature of creativity, the nature of art, the nature of love. Is a human being good or bad, peaceful or violent deep inside? And where is that place we call deep inside? Is it a construct, an illusion, or something real?

Western culture has its roots in the Classical Greek period, whose dramas and tragedies depicted the dramatic and tragic mythologies of their deities, who in turn are metaphors for what human beings essentially are. Did we inherit the tragic arts from the Greek? Is the whole concept of art Greek?

Enough of that existential questioning; I tried to paint a lovingly portrait of two Brazilian actors, the lead characters in the film Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus). The soundtrack for the 1959 French/Brazilian film came courtesy of the legendary Brazilian musicians Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfá. The story of the movie, of course, based on a screenplay by Vinicius de Moraes is an adaption of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. A story of true love with a tragic ending (but with a glimmer of hope at the end of the Camus film). The Top 100 this year features a track from the album, but not one written by either Jobim or Bonfá. In stead it is recording of traditional Brazilian music that is labeled as Générique on the sleeve.

Group from Kigali

Two pygmy musicians
16" x 12", oil on wood, 2013

Different painting, but the same song as in last year's 100. Here's the link to the text and image from March this year. Painted on top of a landscape of my backyard that I turned 90〬.

Pop Music: Björk

Björk
10" x 8", 2013
oil and pastel on canvas

Music that could be labeled as pop is sparse in my top 100, and paintings of pop stars I make only once so often. I don't hear much pop music. I've established a mechanism that excludes me from hearing it too much. I mean, it's easy these days, you pick yourself what you listen to. You don't need radio or tv anymore and indeed, I have neither of them. Last weekend I indulged in a lot of listening to Icelandic pop star Björk. I always liked her music, as I did also like The Sugarcubes (the band she was in before her solo career), but—to my own surprise—she was never featured in any of the previous 30 top 100s. So it's kind of overdue...

La France...

François Dufrêne
pastel on board, 2013
14" x 6"

Oh, the lure of poetry. Poetry may well be the greatest of all arts, one of the oldest too. To be a poet is like the most non-materialistic profession one can occupy. It's from the outset an ill fated profession, the work of a dreamer completely devoid of action. (And therefore it is the noblest of all professions). It is the art form that most defies all commodification, that defies all popularization, all establishment. There's no fame or glory in poetry. I always understood the nobleness of poetry, but I never understood poetry. I've always become extremely bored with poetry, never made it through a volume. But I tried. I always feel inadequate reading poetry, especially when reading poetry criticism. There's so much meaning in poetry that seems only to elude me. Yet, I've tried to write some, I've even published a few in a zine, but it's been an act of defiance; to make public the inadequacy of my intellect. François Dufrêne was a poet, a Lettrist poet, and a pioneer in the field of sound poetry. He was a painter too, known for his technique he called decollage. And he enters my top 100 (as a sound poet) for the fourth time.

Three portraits of Dufrêne. 2006, 2009, and 2010

Some of the poetry I wrote is in French. I don't know much French, just a few words, but not enough to understand the language, and certainly not enough to write in that language, but maybe just enough to write poetry. I figured that without the knowledge of a language I wouldn't have any of the blockage that I experience writing in a language that I do speak. What follows then is gibberish, unintelligible to French speakers, and an embarrassment to myself. It didn't keep me from writing nonsensical French poetry. I filled quite a few pages with it. The following is an outtake of a page-and-a-half that I wrote last week. It's the paragraph that contains an allusion to Dufrêne.

..........Du chien, du frene, du gratulin, comme c’est faire ne pas de rien. Oubliet con gavilette, dans le fete sans briolet. Un cri de loupe attender les filles de frere, mais l’ecole errants la sacre fleur. Nous sommes l’ete, hurlement le chaud temps, arrive tres atterdes. Oui, ma oeil savile huile, mais non, je fais les rouges.......

K.B. Sundarambal

K.B. Sundarambal
13⅜" x 6",
oil on wood, 2013

Re-listening to nominated songs, researching their performers, looking for images, and preparing some boards to paint on; the production of a hundred paintings for the music year 2013 has started in earnest. This weekend I painted the Indian star K.B. Sunderambal. Small as it is, I spent a good number of hours on it. I stumbled upon a recording of Sundarambal on the blog Bodega Pop. The song Pazhari Mali Medi comes from a cd called Kalathil Azhiyatha Kariyam(The Film Hits of K.B. Sundarambal). It was recorded in 1969 for the film Thunaivan. K.B. (Kodumudi Balambal) Sundarambal was born in 1908 in Erode, Tamil Nadu, in South India. She grew up in poverty apparently singing for a handouts in trains when she was a little girl. It was in a train she was discovered and she made her theater debut at age 19, starting a long and successful career that led to her nickname "The Queen of the Indian Stage" (source: Wikipedia). Pazhari Mali Medi is with 2:41 a relatively short song when it comes to Indian cinema. The first 30 or 40 seconds is where it's at. Those precious seconds features her unaccompanied voice. At age 61 her voice is as strong and passionate as you'll ever hear. Then the tablas and sitar come in, the voice lines repeat themselves before the song is interrupted by a short dialogue from the film. The song picks up again into an  intense crescendo. Sundarambal was politically active, became the first film personality to enter a state legislature in India. She died in 1980.

The Birth of Art

Jennie Williams and Nathalie Frost
24" x 12". gouache on oil on canvas, 2012-3

Hand prints, or stencils, are considered the first paintings of human kind. They are a metaphor for the birth of art, and therefor touches on essential characteristics of art as we understand it to be. When, in 1941, the Lascaux caved were discovered, the French writer George Bataille was one of the first to see it. He wrote a book about it: Lascaux, or the Birth of Art. In the chapter When Men First Began to Play he differentiated play with work: Play, as opposed to work, serves no function towards the sustenance of of the human race or the player itself. It is, to use Maya Deren's words: "to conceive beyond necessity", an activity of leisure, a wasteful use of energy, a luxury good. Some years later, Jean-Luc Nancy, another French writer gives this spin of the traced hands: "The traced figure is the trace of the strangeness that comes like an open intimacy, an experience more internal than any intimacy, deep-set like the grotto, open like the aperity and the appearance of the wall. The traced figure is this very opening." In other words: when the walls of the caves, opaque as they are, through the image of the traced hand become a window to the world, they open up to a whole new world, the world beyond the material world as we see it, a world of imagination and creativity. These are the ideas behind this painting in which I intended to open up the opaque ground that is an existing top 100 painting and reintroduce that playful activity that a top 100 painting ought to be. The top 100 started as hobby, and will remain that way (essentially). The existing painting is of two Inuit girls playfully performing a katajjaq (which is a type of throat-singing that is considered just a game). The girls, Jennie and Nathalie, in close proximity, looking each other in the eyes, sing to each other until one wins the game, that is when one misses a beat or starts laughing. This is the end of the song in which was imitative of sounds from nature. Jennie and Nathalie are distant descendents of the people who projected their hands on the cave wall, who migrated north to Siberia, crossed the Bering Strait, and settled in North America. We are too, most all of us, descendents of these peoples that struck Bataille, and Nancy, and Deren too, with awe. And we continue to play, to make our marks on a box car or concrete overpass, to draw a mustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, draw a straight line on a map and walk it too.
I wasn't able to control the painting (but I wiped away the paint that covered Jennie's face). It didn't feel like play (there was no laughter).
Art is defiant
Art is subversive
Art is laughter
Art is—war was, worship—warship, ashes to ashes—dust to dust

The demo

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
oil on canvas board
8" x 10", 2013

Hello again, it's been awhile since a brand new painting was posted here. I've been quit busy with my 7 class assignment this semester. It's not that I haven't been painting, but the paintings I did were all demos for the studio classes. Lots of landscapes (that surely will turn into top 100 paintings), lots of portraits (that I gave to the respective sitters), and also lots of dirty palettes (that will also turn into paintings). This portrait of Pussy Riot's Nadezhda Tolonnikova was the first to go on top of a palette. I painted it the very day the news came out that she disappeared, moved by Russian authorities to an unknown location. I sure hope all of us will hear her story when she gets out of jail, if she ever gets out alive. Putin Light Up the Fires was Riot's last single before their infamous Orthodox Church performance that was the cause of a jail sentence for two members of the Pussy Riot group. It was in last year's 100, and will be in this year's again. The music is simply where it's at in term of punk rock. Ms. Tolokonnikova, a political activist, and conceptual artist, is the voice of Pussy Riot. She wrote the manifesto to protect the integrity of the group, and was described as "the evil genius behind the group." I suspect she also wrote most of the lyrics for the group. 

Demo painting is an art in itself; you're not supposed to screw up being the instructor. But I also need to keep up the integrity of my own painting practice. Practice what I preach. I preach that creativity is more important than technique, that the unconscious knows more than the conscious mind does, and that a successful painting requires the letting go of that consciousness so that the other part can take over. The trouble is with those demos that you're expected to talk your way through, that while you let your unconsciousness make the decisions on the canvas, your voice immediately translates it to the conscious side of the brain. That, and the need for a good result, creates a lot of pressure, and it requires the utmost form of focus and concentration. Sometimes I mess up. 

The M.I.A. portrait of the stencil print below was done in the context of my art appreciation class to non-art majors. As a homework assignment I had (all 53) students make a stencil in an edition of 10. They would keep one to submit with their portfolio for review, and trade eight with class members and the last one with me. The M.I.A. below was their reward. Not every student did the work so I still have about 10 prints left. Let me know if you want one. You can have one for $50. I've already painted M.I.A. for this year's 100, as her Born Free song makes the list for the fifth(!) time, and now this print then is dedicated to her second best song (in my opinion) Paper Planes. Even for Paper Planes it's already the third time in the list. (No other song of hers ever made the list.)

M.I.A.
stencil print on paper, 45/53
6.5" x 6", 2013

Ranie Burnette

Top 100 2000: Ranie Burnette
3.5" x 17", oil and aluminum foil on wood, 2001

The fifth reproduction from the Top 100 2000 series is this painting of Ranie Burnette, a somewhat obscure blues figure from Hill county, Mississippi. Hill county indeed, is that place where the blues tradition lasted longest, where the original tradition still could be witnessed well into the nineteen nineties. It was the place where Junior Kimbrough ran a juke joint that R.L. Burnside frequented, and home to Jessie Mae Hemphill, descendant from a long family history in blues music. Burnette was a mentor to Burnside, whom I've seen perform in the Netherlands. Burnside himself apparently traveled to the Netherlands but I didn't know about that, or about him for that matter. It explains however the find of a 45 single in a local record store. Both sides have been regulars in my top 100s. Side A is Coal Black Mattie, and Hungry Spell is on the other side. The single was released in 1981 on the High Water record label, a local from Tennessee. It was the first Burnette ever recorded. Later he was picked up by a label from his own area called Fat Possum. It finally meant a little bit of recognition for the aging bluesman. That this painting was made in the year Burnette died is purely coincidental. For an additional painting and another text on the Hill county blues scene I'll direct you to http://berrystop100.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-blues.html. The text together with that image of Kimbrough will be published in a forthcoming book called You Should Have Heard What I Just Seen. The painting of Burnside features a quote from one by Marcel Duchamp, whose works I studied intensely in the early 2000s.